Thread: That hardly seems efficient

In days gone by if I wanted to get a new pistol I presented at the district firearms office and filled out a permit to procure (now it is “possess”), got the permit and went to the retailer to get the pistol and came back to the district firearms office with completed permit and pisol for them to check.

Recently I have heard great things at the club about the Firearms Safety Authority making the permit process efficient and guys getting permits within 24 hours (and one getting a permit within 2.5 hours) so having a new pistol arrive at the retailer just prior to Christmas I thought I would try the new on line application process out.

On 27 December I completed the application for a permit to possess on line and was amused that I then had to email the completed form to the FSA (amused because it occurred to me that a simple “submit” button could avoid the extra step of emailing. I did get a very prompt “application received” response email.

Now I didn’t expect immediate results because of my timing but it wasn’t until I chased up the FSA on 9 January that I got a second email that indicated that the application had been sent to my district firearms office for processing. I waited one, two and then three days without any further result so this morning emailed a long time contact at the district firearms office with a polite inquiry asking what my time line expectation should be for me to get the permit to possess and bugger me if an email confirming that the permit was ready for me to pick up didn’t pop up in my in box within an hour.

The thing that struck me as being the most inefficient was that when I picked the permit up it was the same old permit form filled out by hand by an officer in the local firearms office and it had taken a shit load longer for me to get what I had always gotten previously. And ………. it doesn’t escape me that both actions occurred after I had prompted firstly the FSA and secondly my old contact in the district office.

Don’t mistake this for me complaining as I was not really in any rush but all things considered I expected to be able to apply online and get the permit online.and instead what I got was “back to the future” by a very circuitous route.

Not really a surprise though, hopefully after a while it'll become as streamlined as we think it should be.
Just not going to hold my breath

I'd cut them a little slack for the time being. It's a new process. It'll take a bit of time to work out the kinks. And the arms offices were closed over Christmas anyway. They may have a little bit of a backlog to go through.

The police/FSA are crippled by old outdated technology. My wife works for corrections/justice and obviously works with them a lot. No wonder everything takes ages.