Home
By Associated Press
10 June 18
Democrats say Republican gubernatorial candidate must resign. Employee responsible for database did not know how to log on.
or more than a year, Florida failed to carry out national background checks that could have disqualified people from gaining a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Florida does not allow the open carry of weapons, but more than 1.9 million people in the state have permits to carry guns and weapons in public if they are concealed. The lapse in background checks for such permits was revealed in an internal report that was not widely known about until Friday.
The state ultimately revoked 291 permits and fired an employee after an inspector general’s report was sent in June 2017 to top officials. The Tampa Bay Times was the first to publish information about the report, which pointed out that the state failed to check the National Instant Criminal Background Check System from February 2016 to March 2017.
Agriculture commissioner Adam Putnam, a Republican running for governor whose department processes concealed weapons permits and who has touted his efforts to make it easier for people to obtain them, said the state did conduct its own criminal background checks on those applying for permits during that period. He blamed the problem on the negligence of a department employee.
“The former employee was both deceitful and negligent, and we immediately launched an investigation and implemented safeguards to ensure this never happens again,” Putnam said in a statement.
McKinley Lewis, a spokesman for Republican governor Rick Scott, said the governor’s office was never given a copy of the inspector general’s report.
The final report issued in June 2017 states that an employee in the Division of Licensing did not run applications through the national system because she could not log into the database. The employee is quoted as saying that she “dropped the ball”.
The Times interviewed the employee, Lisa Wilde, who told them she was working in the mailroom when she was given oversight of the database in 2013.
“I didn’t understand why I was put in charge of it,” Wilde said.
Democrats and gun control advocates criticized Putnam and said he should resign. Putnam has raised the ire of gun control advocates for his proclamation last year that he was a “proud NRA sellout” who supports the National Rifle Association.
He also said he would not have signed the gun and school safety law enacted by the Florida legislature in the aftermath of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in February, in which 17 people were killed.
“Career politicians like Mr Putnam think this is just another bad day at the office – but when you conceal a level of negligence that endangers every resident, and every child, in Florida, you forfeit any moral right to lead,” said former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine, one of the Democratic candidates for governor.
The state used the national system to see if there were reasons such as mental illness or drug addictions that should prevent someone from being issued a concealed weapons permit. But in March 2017 a state employee noted that the state was not getting any correspondence from people whose applications had been rejected due to information gleaned from the national database.
Statistics compiled by the department show that from the summer of 2015 to the summer of 2017, the number of new applications for concealed-weapon permits jumped dramatically, to its highest level in 25 years.
https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/50558-florida-failed-to-do-national-background-checks-on-concealed-weapons-permits
************