The roof fell in on President Obama when he tried to politicize the murders of church goers to advance gun control legislation. While the President blamed Congress for not enacting strict gun control legislation, FBI Director James B. Comey had to admit on Friday that Dylann Roof was only able to purchase the gun used in the South Carolina church massacre because of breakdowns in the FBI’s background-check system.
Dylan Roof, the person accused of killing the nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina three weeks ago, should have been prevented from buying the .45-caliber weapon used in the shooting, accoding to Comey. “This case rips all of our hearts out, but the thought that an error on our part is connected to a gun this person used to slaughter these people is very painful to us,” said Comey.
The situation was the result of errors not only by the FBI, but by the Lexington County prosecutors’ office. Comey said he has ordered a complete review of procedures that led to the failure. The errors came to light as investigators examined documentation supporting the gun purchase Roof made two months before the shooting.
The review revealed that Roof had been arrested for possession of narcotics in February; a felony charge that alone did not disqualify him from buying a gun. However, Comey said that Roof’s subsequent admission of the drug crime would have triggered an automatic rejection of his gun purchase if the information had been properly recorded in background-check databases.
Unfortunately, Comey said the data was not properly entered in the Bureau’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), and that an FBI examiner assigned to review Roof’s purchase never saw his admission to the narcotics charge.
His revelation to reporters, who were summoned to FBI headquarters on Friday, amounted to a heartbreaking admission by the FBI director that the attack on members of a Bible study group might have been averted.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) promptly sought to head off any effort to tighten gun-control laws. “It’s disastrous that this bureaucratic mistake prevented existing laws from working and blocking an illegal gun sale,” he said in a statement. “The facts undercut attempts to use the tragedy to enact unnecessary gun laws. The American people, and especially the victims’ families, deserve better.”
Under the current law, the FBI has three business days to deny or approve a purchase. But if a decision is not made during that time frame, the law permits the dealer to complete the sale.
On April 13, a veteran FBI examiner who routinely handled 15 or more cases per day pulled up Roof’s request. Checking his criminal record, she saw the narcotics arrest by the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. She faxed a request for information to the sheriff’s office and county prosecutor. But officials at the sheriff’s office told her they were not handling the case and referred her to the Columbia Police Department.
However the process was disrupted by a “geographic irregularity.”
Only a small part of Columbia is located in Lexington County, most of it is in neighboring Richland County. The FBI’s system doesn’t account for that jurisdictional split, and the examiner contacted only the West Columbia Police Department, which reported it had no record of Roof’s arrest.
Had the examiner seen the Columbia Police report that reflected Roof had admitted to possession of a drug, or had prosecutors even told her of its existence, “that transaction would have been denied,” Comey said.
On April 16, after the three-day waiting period had lapsed with no adverse ruling from the FBI, Roof received his gun, the .45-caliber Glock pistol. The law does not require the dealer to notify the bureau when it has sold a gun, bureau officials said.
As the meeting closed, Comey said he had spoken to the examiner and described her as “heartbroken,” but he said she had followed proper procedures.
He said one of the questions under review is whether to treat “delayed pending” checks differently.
A question remains how many other geographic irregularities exist in the system and what is being done to identify them and flag those records.