Because some state employee (you know what that means) has to take your printed information and manually enter it into the database. Same with printed fingerprint cards. There may be only 1 or 2 people that do this, and they can only do so many applications in a day, what with smoke breaks, bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, etc. As Chris Rock said, "When we break.....we break!"
If you apply online and get your prints at LSP, they are immediately entered into the database.
Makes sense -- but at $500/$250/$125 per CCW they should have enough funds to hire a few more data entry personnel..........but that is a management issue......and it seems that their management sux.