People with criminal backgrounds had access to a Houston police property room for months or even years, and more than 30 guns disappeared.
Good grief.
And naturally, the assumption is it must be due to "lax security," as opposed to...oh, I don't know...
And just as naturally, the solution must be to spend $13.8 million on a property room.
Government. Is there anything it doesn't do well?
8 comments:
I thought it was a gun show loop hole that the elite needed to fix, now I see it was a loop hole in the Houston police dept. that they were talking about.
I've been in the Houston police property "room".
It's not a room, it's a three- or four-story warehouse. The bicycles alone fill an entire floor; it's an amazing sight. Nevertheless, the building is old, run down, musty, and dingy. It was never designed for the level of security that's needed.
Under the circumstances, they lose very, very little. Can't remember the exact number, but it's vanishingly small.
The size of the place is such that if an item is misplaced by more than a few shelves, it's essentially lost forever, even though it's really still there.
The chief innovation of the new property building (aside from designed-in physical security, decent lighting, air conditioning, that sort of thing) is to put RFID tags on everything, not just to help thwart theft, but simply to keep track of stuff so that it can found when needed. The planned system will constantly log the location of every item -- and every person -- in the building, to within a few yards. (It's been more than a year since my little tour; plans may well have changed since then.)
Of course, that won't necessarily prevent deliberate theft by knowledgeable insiders. And of course, any civilian operation of equivalent size that lost even two or three guns would be likely be shut down by the BATFX, and the proprietors thrown in the federal pen. As always, the real problem is the Only Ones double standard.
*sigh*
I'm such a ditz. Forgot to explicitly make my point in the above post.
If it's not clear, the new property building has been in the planning stages for several years, and was not intended solely, or even mostly, to prevent the loss of a few guns.
sounds like a pretty bad place to store any guns at all, then. not even us peasants would do that -- we can't just confiscate more when ours are stolen.
"sounds like a pretty bad place to store any guns at all, then."
Or anything else, really, which is exactly why the new facility is being built. HPD is painfully aware of the inadequacies of the existing building.
And let's give credit where credit is due: most of this stuff, guns included, is recovered stolen property and, when it's no longer needed as evidence, will eventually be returned to the owners, if they can be found. The weapons (did I mention the entire room filled with knives?) are either stolen or were confiscated from goblins committing overt crimes. This isn't the BATFX, confiscating guns for the sake of disarming the public.
It's a Good Thing, in general, and the new one is well worth the $14M, given the size of the problem it addresses.
Wrong question. Should have been, is there anything the government does do well.
Stolen money to build a warehouse for stolen possessions. Nice.
No one is accountable there, but Ryan Horsley doesn't get $13.8 million to fix his "problem" when he makes legitimate sales to buyers without a known criminal record. I wonder if Ryan used the defense that the number of discrepancies were "vanishingly small", or that regulatory mandates had exceeded the ability of his systems to be perfectly compliant.
Honestly, cameras are the accountability? No disposition log? No transfer slips? No forms in duplicate? NICS check? No spot checks by the Bundesgendarmarie? Was every gun secured with a gun lock? You mean to tell me that they couldn't be bothered to buy a bunch of quarter-ton fireproof safes from Cabelas before demanding millions?
Our fe'ral government just blew a stack of cash convicting a non-criminal of transferring a "machinegun" to someone else -- without an actual sale happening or any interstate commerce -- but when incompetence resupplies criminals with arms (the ultimate sin in the eyes of the "endgunviolence" crowd), it's: ho-hum lax security, no investigation needed.
Don't let them spend a dime of that money without investigating exactly what went wrong, who knew about it, and why it wasn't fixed. And I don't mean just foisting it on the low-ranking cops on the scene, either. Otherwise I guarantee you that $13.8 million won't solve the problem. Security isn't a product, it's a process.
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