When Christopher Miller showed up at his estranged wife’s home in Illinois last year with a pistol, he had lost his gun license 20 months earlier after brutally beating a man in a parking lot. He disregarded orders to relinquish any weapons, and no one made sure he complied, reports the Chicago Tribune. He choked Cassandra Tanner Miller until she lost consciousness and fatally shot his 18-month-old son, Colton, and then himself, with a .22-caliber Ruger — one of at least three handguns he had despite orders in 2018 from the Illinois State Police to relinquish firearms. The murder-suicide is another indictment of the system’s failure to reduce the growing backlog of people deemed too dangerous to possess firearms. The issue came to light last year when a felon fatally shot five co-workers and wounded others, including five police officers, at a warehouse in Aurora.

Disgruntled employee Gary Martin had been ordered to relinquish his gun five years earlier, after authorities discovered he erroneously had been issued a Firearm Owner’s Identification Card and purchased the Smith & Wesson despite a conviction for beating his girlfriend with a baseball bat. He never complied and authorities didn’t follow through. The case prompted frightening admissions from police about the depth of the revocation problem. The Tribune found that 80 percent of revoked cardholders had failed to account for their guns with local law enforcement. Since the Aurora shooting, the number of revoked cardholders who have not accounted for their guns rose 14 percent to 30,602 in December. At least 36,600 guns remain unaccounted for in Illinois. “We’ve made minimal progress at best,” said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. “We need to get very serious about this. … When you see the numbers we are looking at, the public would be rightfully scratching their heads.”