The House Oversight Committee took the General Services Administration to task on Wednesday for losing hundreds of surplus firearms between 2001 and 2016 that were meant to be properly managed and tracked by the agency.
GSA manages the federal firearms surplus donation program, under which government agencies can donate surplus firearms to the agency, after which they can be made available to state and local government agencies. Donations are meant to be for law enforcement purposes.
Last year, GSA released a report that said nearly 500 firearms were unaccounted for over the last 15 years, while just 24 of those were eventually reported as found.
“The remaining 461 lost firearms — including grenade launchers, Uzis, and assault rifles — were either traded, sold, or remain missing,” according to a House Oversight Committee report, which was based on GSA’s data.
William Sisk, an acting assist commissioner at GSA, testified Wednesday that while several hundred guns are “missing,” about two thirds of them were “found not to be missing, as they had been sold or traded” by the law enforcement agencies that received the weapons.
However, Sisk noted that those sales are “not in compliance with GSA requirements,” and called those transactions “inappropriate.”
“Three hundred and twenty were either sold or traded,” Sisk said. “We have, so far, 102 that we don’t have any information on what eventually happened to them.” Sisk described the remaining few dozen guns as being in another category of guns that are also missing.
Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., complained during the hearing that records of the federal program are kept on paper, not electronically. Inspector General Carol Ochoa told the committee that this form of record keeping is “not particularly accessible, as you can imagine.”
“[The employee] keeps boxes of records. She told us that in order to trace one particular firearm it could take days,” Ochoa testified Wednesday.
There are 9,836 firearms currently in this program, according to Sisk.
“This is my concern, here we have a federal agency, a program that’s totally dedicated to registering and controlling firearms,” Carter said. “Yet, they don’t even know how many they have, they don’t know where they are, they don’t know who has them. In some cases, they don’t even know they are.”
Carter implied that negligence like this shows that maybe firearms are better off in the care of American citizens than controlled by the government.
“Yet, we have an administration that is trying impede on our Second Amendment rights. It’s true. Here we have an agency that can’t even account [for the firearms they have],” Carter said.
“Every responsible firearm owner knows where their guns are. They know what they have, they know where they are. And yet we have the government here that has no idea. This is appalling. Appalling.”
