Put FDLE in charge of gun permits

For 13 months, the Florida agency responsible for issuing concealed-weapons licenses failed to properly screen some 350,000 applications for disqualifying information in an FBI database. When the blunder was discovered, 365 questionable cases were reviewed and 291 permits were revoked. One employee was fired. She claims she was under pressure to approve the applications quickly. It appears she had little supervision.

For Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, whose department was at fault, this couldn’t have happened at a more inconvenient time. He’s running in the Republican primary for governor ... Various Democrats, seeing a target of opportunity, have called on Putnam to give up his The state Department campaign or even resign his of Agriculture failed to office, which strikes us as hyperbolic. properly screen applications for

One could say Putnam concealed-weapons brought it on himself by joking

permits. about being “a proud NRA sellout” in the months before The duty would be the massacre that took 17 lives better entrusted to a in Parkland . ... But there are public-safety agency. issues specific to this incident that deserve more attention than they’ve received so far. Did anyone check to see whether any of those 291 people whose licenses were denied own guns they may not legally possess — for example, a felon whose rights haven’t been restored? ...

“We have no oversight of whether a person has a gun or not, nor do we have a role in the purchase of firearms,” says Jennifer Meale, communications director at the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Questions about legal possession “need to be directed to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,” she said.

The FDLE should ask the agriculture department for those 291 names, if it hasn’t already. Better yet, for the sake of public safety, Putnam should proactively send the names to FDLE to ensure people who shouldn’t own guns, don’t own guns. For while licensed gun dealers must run background checks and refuse to sell weapons to would-be purchasers who flunk them, there are other ways for people who shouldn’t have guns to get them . ...

Putnam and his most vocal defender, NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer, point out that one doesn’t need to own a gun to apply for a concealed-weapons license. True, but why would anyone who doesn’t own a gun bother to apply and lay out the required $97? The only obvious answer is that these people already own a firearm. Or they know permit-holders are exempt from Florida’s constitutional three-day delay on handgun purchases from licensed dealers.

Why is a civilian agency, rather than the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, issuing concealed-weapons licenses? It’s the FDLE, after all, that runs all or nearly all of the background checks. The history is that concealed-weapons permitting was once a function of the secretary of state, who was elected until a 1998 constitutional amendment made it an appointed office under the governor. The weapons function could easily have remained with the office, or moved to the FDLE, but it appears the NRA didn’t want that . ...

As it happens, the FDLE is led by four elected officials, which certainly ought to be better than one. They are the governor, the attorney general, the chief financial officer and the commissioner of agriculture . ...

The only logical reason to keep concealed-weapons permitting under the agriculture department is that one official is inherently more susceptible to the NRA’s influence than four might be. That may be a distinction with only a small difference, considering the NRA’s perpetually heavy hand in Tallahassee.

Nonetheless, weapons permitting is a public-safety function and it belongs in an agency, the FDLE, devoted exclusively to public safety.