BELCHERTOWN — Police Chief Kevin Pacunas is appealing an Eastern Hampshire District Court judge’s ruling that reversed his decision to deny a resident’s application for a gun license.

In his appeal to Hampshire Superior Court, filed Sept. 23, Pacunas contends that Judge Bruce S. Melikian’s decision includes “substantial errors of law.”

The chief stands by his February determination as the town’s licensing authority to deny resident Connor Doran’s application for a license to carry a firearm. The chief has said that Doran did not tell the truth on the application when he said he had never been arrested or appeared in court for a criminal offense, despite facing two criminal charges and an arrest in 2019 for accidentally setting off his firearm at a restaurant bathroom in Chicopee. Pacunas also deemed Doran “unsuitable” to carry a firearm because he had been drinking with his girlfriend at the time of the incident.

Doran and Daniel Hagan, a firearms attorney, filed a petition in Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown seeking to overturn the denial, claiming that Pacunas used subjective criteria to determine Doran’s suitability.

Judge Melikian sided with Hagan, saying that Pacunas’ reasoning was “overly broad, vague and therefore arbitrary and capricious.”

After Melikian denied Pacunas’s request to reconsider his decision, attorney’s representing the town of Belchertown filed a complaint in Hampshire Superior Court on Sept. 23 that asserts that Pacunas denied the licenses based on Doran’s failure to answer every question on his application truthfully and his past criminal record, which are not subjective pieces of evidence.

In the complaint, town counsel writes that any false answers on an application are “just cause for a denial of a license to carry,” citing rules spelled out by the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, which oversees firearms licensing. Filing an application with false information constitutes as a criminal offense, the complain said.

Hagan, however, said that the false answer could have been an honest mistake by Doran, since his charges were dropped and the case was sealed. Pacunas, Hagan adds, never spoke to Doran about this point in his application before denying him a license.

In its appeal, Belchertown takes issue with the legal basis behind Hagan’s petition to the district court seeking to reverse the police chief’s denial of the license. Hagan argued that subjective judgments in granting gun licenses were declared unconstitutional in the 2022 Supreme Court case “New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen.” Judge Melikian agreed with Hagan.

Belchertown’s attorneys, however, said the Bruen case does not apply to Massachusetts’ suitability standard. After the Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts removed the “good reason” portion of its firearms licensing laws to comply with the Bruen ruling, but not the suitability standard, the argued.

In an email to the Gazette, Hagan explained that Doran’s license to carry was reinstated by the South Hadley licensing authority after the incident in 2019, but he was denied the same licenses upon moving to Belchertown for the same incident. The difference of judgment between the two adjacent towns’ licensing authorities, he said, demonstrates the flaw in subjective criteria.

The attorneys go on to argue that Melikian did not follow proper legal procedure to overturn Pacunas’s denial, as Massachusetts General Law requires the courts to hold an evidentiary hearing to decide whether there was “reasonable ground” for the denial of the license.

Melikian denied Pacunas’ request for an evidentiary hearing because the petition was based on “question of the law,” not evidence.

A hearing date for the appeal has not been set in Superior Court.