Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Five Items Denied in One Sentence. The Sixth Is Booked for December.

The Department of Safety answered a request for the records behind a firearms denial on the last day the law allows: one blanket exemption, one 139-day wait, zero explanation.

The answer came on the last day the law allows. On July 30, this newsroom’s editor filed a Right-to-Know request with the New Hampshire Department of Safety: six numbered items, all seeking the records behind a single firearms denial. On August 6, the fifth business day after the request landed, the Department’s written response arrived. Five of the six items were resolved in one sentence. The sixth was given a completion estimate of December 16, 2026.

Disclosure: The request at the center of this story is the editor’s own. It seeks the records underlying an August 31, 2024 Order of Denial issued against him, a denial he is separately contesting through the federal appeal process. GSR reports this dispute the way it reports every records dispute: from the documents. The interest and the record are both on the page, and readers can weigh them together.

What the request asked

The request, logged by the Department as RTK 2026-2163, sought the records underlying the denial order tied to firearms transaction NH 2703011194: the file a state point of contact generates when it stops a sale. Six numbered items covered the determination itself, the material it rested on, and the handling of the record afterward. The Department confirmed receipt on July 30.

The August 6 response disposed of items one through five in a single sentence: exempt, the Department wrote, under RSA 159-D:2. No paragraph. No per-item application. One chapter-and-section citation stretched across five distinct requests for records.

Item six got different treatment. The search was still under way, the response said, and completion was estimated by December 16, 2026. The reason offered, in the response’s own words: “the workloads of the personnel participating in the processing of your request.”

The clock the statute sets

New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law gives an agency three lawful moves when it cannot hand over records on the spot, and it gives them a deadline. Move one: make the record available. Move two: deny the request in writing. Move three: provide a written statement of the time reasonably necessary to determine whether the request will be granted or denied, with the reason for the delay. Whichever move it makes, the agency has five business days to make it. The same paragraph pairs any delay statement with an itemized cost estimate if copying charges would apply. The Department used the full five-day window and made two moves in one letter: a denial for five items, a delay statement for the sixth. No cost estimate accompanied it, and no fee was demanded anywhere in the response, which is consistent with electronic delivery of an electronic file.

On timing alone, then, the letter of the law was met. Day five is still inside the statute. What the statute demands next is where the response thins out.

A denial has to explain itself

Paragraph IV(c) is not decoration. It sets two requirements for every denial: name the specific exemption, and briefly explain how that exemption applies to the record being withheld. The Department’s sentence satisfies half of one. RSA 159-D:2 is a specific citation only the way a street name is a specific address. Which paragraph? Applied how? To which of the five records? The Legislature put the burden of explanation on the agency, and the explanation is the part that did not come.

The statute the Department cited

RSA 159-D:2 is four paragraphs long, and its architecture matters here. Paragraph I makes confidential the records the Department creates when it runs a background check on a buyer who is not found to be prohibited. Then it orders those records destroyed, within a day of the dealer’s request. The confidentiality class the paragraph creates is nearly empty by design: approved-buyer records are supposed to be gone almost as soon as they exist.

Paragraph II addresses the denied buyer. The Department shall retain those records for three years. That is a retention command. It says nothing about disclosure, in either direction. Paragraph III lets the Department keep a bare log of check dates and approval numbers. Paragraph IV forbids reading the section to authorize a registry of gun transactions or owners.

Read together, the section shields approved buyers from disclosure and requires denied buyers’ records to exist. Whether it also walls a denied buyer off from his own file is a question the text does not answer, and a question no New Hampshire court appears to have been asked. That reading is this newsroom’s analysis, not a ruling, and the Department may read the section differently. Which is precisely what paragraph IV(c) exists to surface: name the paragraph, explain the application, and let the requester see where the disagreement lives. GSR’s August 6 reply to the Department demanded that item-by-item statement, along with production of any segregable non-exempt portions in redacted form and written confirmation that responsive records will be preserved while the request is pending.

The state’s own guidance points the other way

There is an irony sitting on the Department of Safety’s own website. The State Police Criminal Records Unit, a division of the same department, publishes the access rules for the state’s most sensitive criminal-history data. Public conviction records go to anyone for a fee. Confidential criminal history information, including non-conviction data, is released under that published guidance to law enforcement or, in the page’s words, “a person requesting his or her own record.”

That guidance describes the criminal-history regime under a different chapter, RSA 106-B, not the background-check records at issue here, and the two are not interchangeable. But the design principle the state itself publishes is hard to miss: even where New Hampshire draws its tightest confidentiality lines, the subject of the record stands on the access side of the line. The Department’s blanket reading of 159-D:2 runs the other way. The one person the withheld records are about is the one person told he cannot see them.

One hundred thirty-nine days

Then there is the calendar. The statute permits a delay statement, and it defines the delay it permits: the time reasonably necessary to determine whether the request shall be granted or denied. Not the time convenient. Not the time left over after other work. The Department’s estimate for a single remaining item runs from midsummer to the middle of December, 139 days from receipt and 132 from the response itself, and the reason given is workload. The estimate spans ninety-nine weekdays. The statute’s own decision yardstick is five. As this story publishes, 107 calendar days are still on the clock — an item the Department says it is still searching for will, on its own schedule, outlast the World Series, the November election, and Thanksgiving.

Reasonableness is not self-certifying. December 16 will have to explain itself, the same way the blanket exemption will.

One front among ten

This request does not sit alone. It is one of ten open Right-to-Know matters this newsroom is tracking across New Hampshire police departments and state agencies, a running audit that has already produced documented five-day misses, productions with redactions carrying no exemption statements, and written answers that requested policy manuals do not exist. The published entries in that audit already include the Gilford series, where produced records carried exact modification timestamps on officer narratives roughly two months after the incident, in a records system the department stated keeps no version history. The pattern coverage will continue naming departments as each story clears the file. What this front adds is a state agency, a citizen’s own records, and a December date, all in one letter.

Where a dispute like this goes now

If the Department holds its position, the law’s enforcement machinery is supposed to take over. In New Hampshire, in 2026, that machinery is one door. The Right-to-Know Ombudsman, the office the Legislature created to resolve exactly these disputes for a $25 filing fee, has been vacant since Thomas Kehr resigned in July 2025 after lawmakers cut the office’s funding from roughly $105,000 to $30,000. The Secretary of State’s website carries the consequence in plain terms: “No action can be taken on any filings” until there is a new ombudsman. More than a year on, no nominee has been put forward. No one had even applied, the governor’s office said in March.

That leaves a petition in superior court under RSA 91-A:7, with its filing costs and its timelines, terrain this newsroom has mapped in detail. Readers who want the full architecture of the vacancy and the court route can find it in GSR’s earlier reporting: New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Ombudsman Seat Has Been Empty 13 Months (July 29), The Only Door Left Costs $285 to Open. Then It Takes Years. (August 21), and the primer Your Right to Know: A Working Guide to RSA 91-A (July 25). This dispute now joins that record as a live case study, with the referee’s chair still empty.

What happens next

For any New Hampshire reader, the mechanics are the point. The same five-business-day clock, the same IV(c) explanation requirement, and the same empty referee’s chair that govern this request to the state govern your request to your town hall, your school board, your police department. Watch how this one is handled and you learn how yours will be.

Nothing in this dispute turns on money; the Department asked for none. The levers here are the quieter pair — exemption and time — and both are now on paper, in the Department’s words and this newsroom’s. The demand for a real, item-by-item denial is on file. The preservation demand is on file. December 16 is on the calendar. The records will land, or the deadline will, and either way the next chapter gets written from documents. That is the only way this newsroom writes them.

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