California’s Gun Seizure Program Hits Hurdles
19th February 2019
One of the perennial problems with airy-fairy programs passed into law by ideologue legislators is the failure to think things through.
Authorities in California are struggling to enforce a state law that permits officials to seize firearms from people with previous criminal convictions or mental health issues – running into staffing and budgetary issues that have contributed to a massive backlog of guns marked for confiscation.
Plenty of research (if you can call it that) is done to accumulate data that supports the existence of a problem and a sense of urgency about crafting a solution, but not enough is ever done to create realistic estimates of what the program actually put in place will accomplish. High-speed and light rail transportation systems are constantly dying on this particular rock.
“We get people straight out of college, with minimal law enforcement experience, and we have to train them for a year,” Alfredo Cardwood, president of the Justice Department agents union, told the Chronicle. “After we train them, they skip out and go work for the local D.A.s.”
This is one of the reasons that businesses rarely train new hires any more. If people who worked for state governments had, as they used to, prior business experience, this possibility would have raised a red flag. Unfortunately, nowadays, people go straight into government jobs right out of school and never spend any time subject to the constraints of real-world enterprises.