NYC has trouble keeping track of guns

According to this article in the New York Times, an audit of NYPD property room inventory procedures found some problems:

Nearly one out of three handguns and rifles that had been turned in to the police could not be immediately accounted for in a Manhattan property clerk’s office, according to a city audit released on Tuesday that criticized the Police Department’s storage procedures.

The audit, conducted by the office of William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller, examined the records of 324 weapons chosen at random out of thousands in storage in the Manhattan property division. Ninety-four of them could not be immediately found in their assigned storage areas.

“It’s a case of weapons gone AWOL,” Mr. Thompson said at a news conference on Tuesday.

After the initial search, it was determined that 70 of the 94 weapons had been returned to their owners or destroyed, Mr. Thompson said, while 24 “miraculously” turned up on shelves from where they had previously been missing after several attempts to find them.

“At no time were we given a satisfactory explanation about where the firearms had been, how they had been located or how they had been returned to the same spot that the auditors and the property clerk staff had checked on at earlier dates,” Mr. Thompson said.

Isn't it ironic that New York City Mayor Bloomberg likes to disparage firearms dealers for their (mostly minor) paperwork and inventory errors, when his own police department can't keep track of the guns in their possession?