Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald says he's concerned about the current explosion in gun sales and applications that are at record highs both locally and across the country, in the wake of two mass shooting in one week.
He tells Marty Griffin on News Radio KDKA that he has seen first-hand the long line of folks waiting for a concealed-carry permit, and that has him worried.
"It does, and we've seen, you know, peaks of this, and we certainly saw, I've seen it visually, you know, that the line is longer this week, than it has been", he says. "But the fact is there are an awful lot of guns out in the street and in the country".
Fitzgerald is advising people to get appropriate training when purchasing a gun.
On the vaccine front, Fitzgerald says the county is about one-third of the way of reaching their vaccination goals. He tells Griffin that their goal all along was to get about 70 to 80 percent of the adult population in the county vaccinated. That would be 700 to 800-thousand people.
"At this point, we've got over 550-thousand vaccinations in place, so about a third of that, a little more than that, has happened", he says.
Fitzgerald says those numbers do not include the people who have already had COVID, thereby giving them some immunity and protection. He says more than 80-thousand people in the county have tested positive for the virus.
Fitzgerald admits that the county's new vaccine registry that was announced yesterday took longer to set up than he had anticipated. But he tells Griffin that this new registry will be a lot better than the state system, which just wasn't working.
"You already will be able to register, and then you will get a call or an email notifying you when your appointment is, rather than the person having to keep calling back, keep registering, keep trying to get in..."
Fitzgerald says the new system will start up next week.