Is it really that surprising?

Actually, yes, it was to me.

I’ve posted recently about the Oregon teacher with the court-issued restraining order against an ex, who went through the training and gained her CCW, but is now blocked by her employer, the government, from using her pistol and her training to protect herself.

I don’t know what made them write about the topic of restraining orders, but someone at the Seattle Times was on the ball this weekend and congratulations are in order.

The Seattle woman figured she’d have no problem securing a protection order against a man who had ignored her repeated requests to be left alone.

It was early April, just days after University of Washington employee Rebecca Griego was shot to death at work by an obsessive ex-boyfriend who had been stalking her despite a protection order.

Given the media coverage of the Griego slaying, the Seattle woman thought her situation would get quick attention.

She wrote a detailed account of the man’s dozens of unsolicited e-mails and unwanted advances. She went before a judge, who quickly signed the temporary order for protection — a precursor to a permanent protection order.

Yet it took nearly a week and a string of phone calls by the woman and a family lawyer before the order was delivered to her accused stalker by King County sheriff’s deputies. The delays left the woman feeling vulnerable and unprotected.

And she was lucky. For others in the same situation, it can take much longer — often, orders are never served at all.

In Seattle last year, only 58 percent of the 1,076 temporary domestic-violence orders sent to the Police Department were successfully served. There are various reasons for the delays and difficulties in issuing protection orders, depending on whom you ask. Police say they are as diligent as possible with the dozens of weekly orders that must be delivered, often to bad addresses or to respondents who don’t want to be found. Court personnel say some law-enforcement agencies are simply better than others about following through.

Whatever the reasons, people like the Seattle woman say the system isn’t running smoothly and is leaving those seeking help frightened, frustrated and exposed.

First of all, if there weren’t so many women who were demanding that a court issued piece of paper “protect them, then this problem wouldn’t be overwhelming the local policing agencies.

That may sound a bit harsh, but since the SCOTUS has ruled that the government has no responsibility for your safety, the cops could simply choose to round-file these orders and there would be nothing but public opinion mongering that could be done about it.

In fact, sometimes I wonder if that would be the best solution to this whole situation. Cut the reliance on the state/county/city for your protection, and all but the most apathetic self-loathers will do something for themselves for once. Give a generation of young women the knowledge that life is not like the movies and that the police won’t babysit you when you make a horrible choice as to whom you become friends with, and creeps will die out, because women will be killing them. As they should.

But that is probably really harsh and possibly overly relies on people to take more action than to whine to the press about how they can’t live their lives without consequence.

So let the government whose only reason for helping you stay alive is so that it may tax you keep issuing their useless pieces of paper. And let those who decide they don’t want to know any better keep relying on them and the consciences of the employees in the policing agencies.

Myself, I’ll just use the orders for what they’re supposed to be used for: Showing the prior intent of the sonofabitch who I filed the order on and still had to shoot.