Florida didn’t run FBI background checks on gun buyers for a year—the reason why is mind-boggling

The state of Florida , home to the second deadliest mass shooting on American soil andthe Parkland massacre earlier this year, went for more than a year without running FBI background checks on tens of thousands of applications for concealed weapons permits. As far as why this happened: An employee reportedly was unable to login to the system. The Tampa Bay Times reports that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services stopped using the National Instant Criminal Background Check System FBI crime database in February 2016, and the discrepancy wasn’t discovered by another employee until March 2017. It’s worth noting that the aforementioned mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub that left 49 people dead and 50 injured happened during that window, in June 2016. During this time, potential gun-buyers who would have normally been flagged—for reasons such as mental illness, having been involuntarily committed, serving prison time for more than a year, or dishonorably discharged from the military—passed freely through the system. Lisa Wilde, the employee who was in charge of running background checks, has since been fired, although she admitted to the Times that she had been working in the mail room when she was first tasked with managing the database in 2013 and doesn’t understand why she was put in charge of it in the first place. Meanwhile, the Times writes that Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam has pushed to speed up the process of issuing concealed weapons permits—from 12 weeks to just 35 days—since he was […]

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