Since November 1, 2016, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department has been using an online system to consider applications for permits to carry concealed weapons, what are known as CCWs.

Tested for a month prior to its official adoption, the new PermitDirector system operates through a deal with Permitium LLC, which the county board of supervisors retroactively approved funding for earlier this month. PermitDirector is paid for through October 31, 2019, and the contract can be extended another two years. The system has been touted as a way to cut down on paperwork and speed up the application process. But will it affect public safety?

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Stanford Law School Professor John Donohue has documented his criticisms of the sheriff’s department’s lenient approach to dispensing CCW permits on his own blog and in the op-ed section of The Sacramento Bee. Much of that criticism has been aimed directly at Jones, whose stated views that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens make the public safer Donohue disagrees with.

“Scott Jones was very enthusiastic about right to carry and was sort of handing the permits out like candy,” Donohue told SN&R. “He sort of subscribed to this … view that good things will happen if you hand out these permits, but he was not always honest about it.”

Donohue referenced a speech Jones gave in 2013 telling audience members that no one had ever “been shot by a holder of a concealed weapons permit issued by this office.”

This was untrue. According to Donohue, and confirmed by court documents, in October 2012, Jones signed a letter revoking a CCW permit his agency granted to Hun Chu Saelee after Saelee shot a college student in the head at a Halloween party months before Jones’ claim.