With Maryland’s tough gun control laws about to take effect October first, there’s been a rush on to make purchases at firearms dealers throughout the state, creating a backlog of tens of thousands of gun purchase background checks.
Gun rights advocates complained bitterly that if the backlog weren’t cleaned out before the new law goes into effect, those whose permits were caught in the backlog may have to start all over again under tighter restrictions. Or worse, they may not be able to buy their intended weapons at all.
So, state officials enlisted the help of clerks from five other state agencies to enter the names, addresses, dates of birth and social security numbers from the gun permit applications into a data base to allow police to more efficiently conduct the checks.
And that really set off gun rights groups, who feared private information could have been compromised. Patrick Schomo, president of Maryland Shall Issue, one of those groups, worried that those clerks had not been subjected to the same background checks and scrutiny as law enforcement officers undergo and that they might misuse the information.
“How many of those people used that data base to look up the address of an ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, someone with a protective order against them to find their address,” he asked. “Can the state tell us that did not occur? They can’t.”
Even worse, he said, the information was sent unencrypted over the internet where anyone with the proper user name and password could get access to it. Schomo said that’s like putting your Social Security number “on the back of the postcard and then mailing it across the state and saying, oh, yeah that’s definitely secure.”
But State Police spokesman Greg Shipley argued these weren’t just any old state employees handling the information. They were data entry clerks from the departments of Human resources, Transportation, Public Safety and Correctional Services, Juvenile Services and Health and Mental Hygiene.
“These are all agencies where data entry personnel are daily involved with dealing with sensitive information about people,” he said. That includes mental health, inmate, criminal or even driving records.
He said he was frustrated by the argument that information wasn’t protected. Gun purchasers have no assurances that the clerks at the firearms dealers who take their applications have undergone background checks, either, he said. “It wasn’t protected when you handed the sheet back over at the firearms dealer.”
State police have the date, time and IP address of every entry to the data base, Shipley said. They would know if someone using a non-government computer tried to get access to the information, and they have “no information that that has occurred.”
If Schomo has such information he should report it to state police “so we could follow up and conduct a criminal investigation,” Shipley said.