Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Last year, the state set up a pilot program with seven counties... in which gun owners could start the process early. The intent was to avoid a last-minute rush as the 2018 deadline approached.

At the start of the pilot plan, county clerks and state officials had meetings and biweekly phone conferences with State Police and Office of Information Technology Services officials. But the sessions became more sporadic last fall, the clerks said.

By February, as the first of 500 handgun owners were supposed to get their recertification notices, the process came to a halt, Larkin said.

"They said they would notify us when they wanted us," said Larkin, who chairs a NY SAFE Act subcommittee for the state County Clerks Association.

Some of the county clerks, including Larkin and Read, subsequently pulled out of the pilot program.

State officials haven't told the clerks why the pilot program has slowed. But most believe it has to do with difficulties in creating a new handgun database.

"They didn't anticipate the amount of time it was going to take to establish that digital database," Larkin said.

Still, the challenges of creating vast statewide databases have become apparent with other components of the NY SAFE Act.

A system allowing background checks for all ammunition sales was originally supposed to be in place by Jan. 15, but its rollout has been indefinitely postponed amid reports the database isn't ready.

Nor has it gone unnoticed that county clerks were told the pace of work on the handgun effort would likely pick up at the end of the year — after the November elections, in which voters who are still upset about the NY SAFE Act could be a factor.

It wasn't immediately clear how many handgun permit holders the state will need to contact. The State Police have a list of permits with more than 300,000 names, but it is said to date to the 1930s.

Quoted:
I see dead people...



The county data does not get properly purged.  If you ever saw the old list that floated around the web a few years back, you know that it's full of dead people and folks that have moved out of state.

What a fustercluck.