Want to carry a gun in Riverside County? You have to wait 2 years just to be considered

It was the summer of 2016 when Steve Perkio, a retired construction worker with a love for the outdoors, walked into the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department headquarters with his paperwork in hand. Perkio planned to spend much of his retirement camping in the rural wilderness, where he would often be isolated and alone, so he figured it was wise for him to start carrying a gun for protection.

Perkio turned in his application for a concealed weapon license and asked how long the review process would take. A polite sheriff’s deputy showed him several two-foot stacks of unprocessed applications, each one just like his.

They would all have to be reviewed before Perkio’s turn would come, the deputy warned.

The wait would be about 28 months.

“It was a shock,” said Perkio, 56, who is licensed to carry a gun in 26 states, but a year-and-a-half later is still waiting for his application to be processed in Riverside. “If something happens in the meantime, this is a Second Amendment opportunity to protect myself that I simply don’t have.”

This lengthy wait for a concealed weapon license may sound extreme, but in Riverside County, it is not. Due to years of surging interest in concealed firearms, spurred in part by mass shootings in nearby cities, the average waiting period to be considered for a carry license in Riverside County has climbed from a few months to two years. On any given day, hundreds of applicants, many with a compelling reason to carry a gun, are stuck in a paperwork backlog, waiting to be interviewed.

The backlog has become a persistent challenge for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which processes “Carry Concealed Weapon Licenses,” or CCWs, for nearly the entire county, but insists it cannot keep up with demand due to budget constraints. In a recent interview, Sheriff Stan Sniff, a pro-gun rights Republican, described the backlog as a “microcosm” for a larger budget struggle that has forced the department to trim patrols, leave empty positions unfilled and underfund non-essential services.

“I think it is important that we keep issuing CCWs, but the budget really limits my ability to throttle up and handle the increased workload,” Sniff said. “Just holding our own, at this point, is about the best we can do.”

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Concealed weapon licenses are handled differently across states and counties, but in Riverside County, the process works like this: Applicants download forms from the sheriff’s department website, then schedule an in-person interview with staff from the CCW Unit. If approved during the interview, applicants will be fingerprinted, complete a safety course and qualify with each weapon they plan to carry.

Historically, this whole process took no more than two or three months, said Sniff, who has served as sheriff for a decade.

Nowadays, applicants may wait eight times that long just to get the interview.

“Two years is ridiculous,” said Justin Luhrs, 38, of Riverside. “Even six months is too long.”

Luhrs, who bought his first firearm when he turned 18, said he would like to carry a gun because his work as a freelance IT consultant often takes him into dangerous neighborhoods. But the hefty wait time has discouraged him from even applying for a license.

Luhrs has instead resorted to carrying a unloaded gun in a lockbox in his trunk, but admits the weapon would be of little use in an emergency. Legally, he is required to store the gun in a locked container, with ammo locked in a different container.

In a crisis, it would take so long to ready his weapon he might as well not have it at all.

“Ultimately, that delay could cost me my life,” Luhrs said. “Not just the delay of getting a license, but the delay of legally deploying my firearm.”

By most accounts, Riverside County’s CCW backlog began in December 2015, shortly after a mass shooting in the neighboring San Bernardino County killed 14 and injured 22 others. A radicalized Islamic couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, attacked a government holiday party with assault rifles and handguns.

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In the weeks that followed the attack, the sheriff’s concealed weapon unit found itself swarmed by hundreds of phone calls, emails and applications, officials said. Interview appointments were suddenly booked for the next 18 months.

“It’s been overwhelming,” said Capt. David Teets, a former unit supervisor, said in 2016. “We have two folks who work in that department, and after the terror attacks, they were absolutely inundated with people wanting concealed weapons permits.”

That was two years ago, and although the surge in applications seemed like a knee-jerk spike at the time, the sheriff’s department says the interest in concealed weapon licenses never faded.

In an email statement, the department said a “deluge” of applications has “continued non-stop since 2015.” Sniff added that the department has faced a constant workload of 400 to 500 applications since the San Bernardino shooting, which then increased to 500 to 600 requests after an even deadlier mass shooting in Las Vegas in October. As a result of this demand, the total number of active licenses in the county has risen from about 1,700 two years ago to more than 3,000 today.

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Applicants can skip to the front of the line if they show an “immediate and substantiated threat to life,” but it doesn’t happen often, according to the sheriff’s department.

Soon, one of those expedited applications will likely belong to Ana Sofia Miramontes, a Jurupa Valley resident, who said she recently described to Sniff himself how she had been harassed by a stalker. Sniff said to Miramontes that she will likely qualify to be fast tracked, she said.

“Waiting two years was a scary thought,” Miramontes said. “I really need that firearm today.”

All of these applications, expedited or not, run through the CCW Unit, which has traditionally consisted of just two deputies and an office assistant. The sheriff’s department added two part-time employees to the unit early last year, but insists it can’t afford to add more.

Ultimately, the CCW backlog is caught in the middle of a persistent budget battle between the sheriff’s department, which insists it is running a “bare bones” operation, and the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, which has demanded the agency find ways to sustain itself with less in the face of falling government revenue. Last summer, the department was funded for about $257 million – $18 million less than the prior year – but still the single largest share of the county's overall budget. Sniff had asked for $50 million more, saying that without this funding he might be forced to close sheriff's stations and reduce patrols. More recently, Sniff has said he doesn't have enough funding to hire staff for the new Indio jail, which is supposed to be completed this year.

Faced with stakes like those, Sniff said, there is little hope for finding money to process paperwork.

“Only when these budget issues lighten up for us, a lot of that two-year backlog will end up vaporizing,” Sniff said.

In addition to these budget constraints, the backlog is exacerbated by the fact that, until recently, the sheriff’s department was the county’s only option for acquiring a concealed weapon license. Eleven other police departments in the county had the authority to process applications, but didn’t, leaving the sheriff’s department to pick up the slack in cities where it does not patrol, like Palm Springs and Indio.

That all changed a few months ago when four mid-county cities – Banning, Beaumont, Hemet and Murrieta – outsourced the application process to a private company, at least in part because of frustration with the existing backlog. The company, MyCCW.us, charges three times as much as the sheriff’s department, but says licenses can be issued in as little as 18 days.

The privatized process offers a new option to some residents who are determined to carry a gun, but it doesn’t help more than two million Riverside County residents who don’t live in those four cities. It also offers no help to applicants like Perkio, the outdoorsman who is already 20 months into his 28-month waiting period.

During his interview, Perkio said he tried to wait patiently, but he finally became fed up last June, then sent a Facebook message to the sheriff complaining about the delay. Perkio said he never expected an answer, but Sniff wrote him back an hour later, repeating a similar refrain about budget constraints.

The message was polite and sympathetic, Perkio said, but it didn’t make the wait any shorter.

“I appreciated his response,” Perkio said. “But it’s still very frustrating when criminals are carrying illegally and law abiding citizens have their hands tied.”

Reporter Brett Kelman covers public safety for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at (760) 778-4642 or brett.kelman@desertsun.com or followed on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.