“The federal government received a bipartisan bashing Wednesday for losing track of hundreds of guns and grenade launchers that were donated to police departments,” thehill.com reports. “The General Services Administration (GSA) has transferred more than 9,800 firearms to state and local police departments since 1999. But many of these weapons have later turned up for sale at gun stores or been stolen, according to a government watchdog.” How many? Not specified. Note: this is not the defense department program criticized for militarizing America’s police. This is . . .

the GSA’s Surplus Firearm Donation Program. The GSA’s SFDP transfers “unused” federal agency weapons to state and local police po-po, including grenade launchers and backpack nukes (JK).

The GSA requires agencies receiving the guns to report lost of missing items to the GSA’s web- based property transfer system (GSAXcess). According to a report submitted to Congress by the Honorable Carol Fortine Ochoa Inspector General, General Services Administration, here’s how well the GSAXcess system worked.

The OIG [Office of the Inspector General] found that GSA’s database records of firearms donations were incomplete and inaccurate, and that inventory controls were not sufficient to monitor firearms donated to state and local law enforcement agencies. Information in GSAXcess used to record the initial transfer was incomplete, often missing critical data such as the names and addresses of the state/local law enforcement agencies receiving the donated firearms.

Other GSAXcess information was entered incompletely or placed in the wrong data fields, including the serial number, make, and model of the donated firearms.

GSAXcess was not designed to record activity after the initial donation of the firearms, such as information about reports of missing or stolen weapons. The program officer for GSA [ED: singular, as in one, to keep track of 10k firearms.] kept paper records of the initial donations, and used spreadsheets to manually track subsequent activity. These records, however, could not be sorted or searched electronically, contained inaccuracies, and were disorganized.

GSA has not provided states with uniform guidance for annual inventories procedures. Inventory controls were weak with quality varying from state to state.

There has been a general lack of oversight from GSA. Issues of data reliability have affected inventory results and caused donated firearms to be overlooked in the inventory process, increasing risk of theft or unauthorized use.

Congress is outraged, I tell you! Outraged!

“This is not rocket science,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.). “I don’t understand how something so simple can’t be done,” he asked. “We can put a man on the moon and yet we can’t track firearms?” An inspector’s general report issued in June 2015 found that 485 firearms have gone missing — only 24 have been recovered, while the rest remain on the lose. During the first hearing on the matter, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed concern. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) said it is “appalling” that the federal government would lose track of the firearms. “This is my concern,” Carter said. “Here we have a federal agency that is only dedicated to registering and controlling firearms. Yet they don’t even know how many they have, they don’t know where they are, and they don’t know who has them.”

And the antis want the feds to implement “universal background checks” for Americans exercising their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. Feh.