Following the latest mass shooting in Texas, I have realized that there are some similarities in two of our country’s biggest perceived problems. Immigration registration and gun registration, are undoubtedly two huge bureaucracies in our government, that are probably not being run as efficiently as designed. It is not unusual for government bureaucracies to be run inefficiently. In fact, government programs from dog catching to welfare, have been the butt of jokes by the general public for generations. “Not bad for government work” is a line that I remember hearing over several decades.
Extreme bureaucracies don't just exist in communist and socialist countries
We know that the fall of the Soviet Union, in the 1990’s was in part due to the inefficiencies of the state running all of the important systems and programs in the land. “It had proclaimed a new humanitarian ideology, in which nothing was left to chance, and it created an elephantine bureaucracy that finally smothered the economy.”; wrote the NY Times after the fall of the U.S.S.R, in 1991. So onward we march as a free and democratic society “superior” in every way. Well, not quite, as our Republic has grown, our government has grown too. Our Federal government includes some 430 agencies and 2,700,000 employees.
Suffice it to say, that we have bureaucracy-heaven right here in the good ole’ U.S of A.
Being the "Forensic Files," "Dateline," "20/20," and "ID" aficionado that I am, I have learned that even in the age of DNA identification, our ability to check fingerprints across state lines ( i.e. have all prints on a national database accessible to all law enforcement ) is only a few years old!
Gun Violence: if it's about the people and not the guns then let us hire more healthy people to get on top of it
We have all heard of, if not experienced ourselves, the Extreme backlogs that exist in immigration agencies, of people waiting for years to be approved for Green Cards, and long, very thorough screenings, etc. We could perhaps all agree that these backlogs even contribute to people coming over the borders illegally.
Moreover, we have heard stories of the documented mentally unstable person who was on the “radar” of one Federal agency or another, but in the end, wasn’t stopped from committing a heinous crime, due to the inability to connect the dots before the individual acted.
In this most recent Gun Violence incident where 26 people were killed and 20 more were injured, in the small town Texas church massacre, we have found that one Federal bureaucracy dropped the ball by not making the perpetrator’s violent history available to the proper database years ago. This information, we are told, would have flagged him as ineligible to ever be a gun owner.
Take the money from the Wall and pour it into already existing processes and systems
Let’s be real. We are not going to build a “Wall,” and it appears we are not going to take people’s guns away. So it seems to me that one example of what can be done may be to follow the example of what large cities would do during the 1960’s in response to an increase in crime. They would add thousands of police to their police force, whatever the cost.
What if we made the manpower increases needed in the administration of both gun purchasing applications and immigration applications, to make sure that we get our country’s administration of these bureaucracies up to speed with where technology is today. Surely in 2017, we can do better with our existing laws and provisions.
Let’s stop burying our head in the sand and hoping for some great idea to come out of a political campaign. We need to roll up our sleeves and hire the bodies to input the data and make sure the data is available on the spot; whatever the cost.
