In re. Dylann Roof: don’t blame a flag…blame the FBI
“This rips all of our hearts out”
Today, South Carolina’s confederate flags were lowered for the last time, thus ending the long and drawn out battle over what the flag means, what it doesn’t mean, and whether or not it should be flown above the state’s capitol building.
After Dylann Roof allegedly killed 9 people at a church in Charleston last month, many activists came out of the woodwork to blame not Roof’s mental state, or his admitted racism, for the massacre, but the pernicious influence of the Civil War, the race wars, and the continued unfurling of the Confederate Flag.
It was a field day for social justice warriors. Even President Barack Obama was quick to blame the country as a whole for the murder of innocents; but as it turns out, he needn’t look further than the front door of FBI Headquarters if he’s still in search of a more controversial scapegoat.
As it turns out, as per the federal government’s own procedures, Roof shouldn’t have been able to buy a gun at all.
The New York Times explains:
Mr. Roof first tried to buy the gun on April 11, from a dealer in South Carolina. The F.B.I., which conducts background checks for gun sales, did not give the dealer approval to proceed with the purchase because the bureau needed to do more investigating about Mr. Roof’s s criminal history.
Under federal law, the F.B.I. has three days to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to deny the purchase. If the bureau cannot come up with an answer, the purchaser can return to the dealer and buy the gun.
In the case of Mr. Roof, the F.B.I. failed to gain access to a police report in which he admitted to having been in possession of a controlled substance, which would have disqualified him from purchasing the weapon. The F.B.I. said that confusion about where the arrest had occurred had prevented it from acquiring the arrest record in a timely fashion.
Mr. Roof’s application was not resolved within the three-day limit because the F.B.I. was still trying to get the arrest record, and he returned to store and was sold the gun.
Many major national gun dealers, like Walmart, will not sell the weapon to the buyer if they do not have an answer from F.B.I., but many smaller stores will.
I’d hate to be an FBI employee today.
FBI Director James B. Comey said today the only thing he could: This case rips all of our hearts out. But the thought that an error on our part is connected to this guy’s purchase of a gun that he used to slaughter these good people is very painful to us.
So there it is. As of right now, barring further revelations, we should be blaming the federal government (at least in part) for what happened in Charleston.
Hindsight is 20/20—especially when you’re dealing with loopholes that end up getting people killed; but that doesn’t change the fact that the federal government’s saving grace wasn’t enough to stand in between a shooter and his victims.
But we knew that already.
And the spin cycle spins on.
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Comments
Surprise! Huge bureaucracies are grossly inefficient! So why do people keep wanting to empower our government to get bigger and bigger and to allow it to grab more and more power away from the individual? WTF is wrong with these people?
Plus Obama has been weakening the FBT for the last 7 years.
Leftist Democrats are to blame.
FBI
They lowered the flags.
They celebrated.
They praised themselves.
Now they can go back to calling us Hispanics and Blacks inferior.
Now they can go back to saying we are so stupid that we cannot manage to get a photo ID.
Now they can go back to lowering academic standards for us, because “we can’t do better.”
Now they can go back to bribing those of us with no pride, by offering welfare peanuts.
Now they can go back to their condescending self-righteousness, because they think nobody can see through them, because they think this way nobody will notice that they’re actually the racist ones.
He would have just bought a gun illegally. It is what criminals do.
He DID buy it illegally.
Sooooo, the solution is to plug the “FBI Loophole”? Here we go again…
not a loophole … a failure to enter data correctly … completely different issue …
The ‘loophole’ is that if the NICS check does not come back in time (no matter the cause), the default action is to release the firearm to the buyer.
Tom Swift’s comment about “pocket veto”.
And you can bet that if they close that ‘loophole’ like they’re sure to want to, then suddenly funding will dry up as they’ll see no reason to do FBI checks at all.
Suddenly they have the result they want. Nobody buying new guns.
Procedures will be written, training will be conducted and another layer of bureaucracy will ensure an even greater chance of error for the next gun sale. Because now, instead of 103 regulations to consider, there will be 104.
The ‘rats handled this entire fiasco masterfully. We now have “slavery” reparations as the next course in this ongoing feast of racial absurdities. Because Roof had a Confederate flag, the woes of slavery are again life-altering experiences in the here and now. Never mind that the last child-slave died some 60 or more years ago at 110+ years of age, and the same for anyone from a slave owning family who would have been a mere child when slavery was abolished.
As for the FBI, it’s always fun to chortle at the feds and their incompetence, but watch this get spun into a big effort to extend the background check to ninety days – or whenever the FBI feels like it, which could be never.
The ‘pubs won’t stand in their way, be it reparations or gun control. This congress has decimated the party. Well done, Mr. Speaker and Mr. leader. The ‘pubs will never get a turnout like they did in 2014. The cowards are finished.
“Many major national gun dealers, like Walmart, will not sell the weapon to the buyer if they do not have an answer from F.B.I., but many smaller stores will.”
The FBI is required to provide a response within three business days, not including the day of the check before the gun can be legally transferred. So, it’s actually about 4 days unless there are holidays involved (government math in action). This law was put into place to keep the FBI from putting people on permanent delay which this administration would do, if given the chance. If I have a customer who receives a delay on Monday, they can pick up their firearm on Friday (provided the delay doesn’t turn into a deny). I’ve known people with active security clearances who’ve received delays so the system isn’t exactly foolproof.
The FBI – these people are able to see everything people are doing (with all those data sweeps, phone records, etc.), yet this guy wasn’t on their radar screen…..?
These clowns are calling patriotic citizens “terrorists” and putting Conservatives on watch lists and plotting to prosecute non-profits, yet this blatantly racist hater – with a record – just “somehow” falls through the cracks….?
Yet this is EXACTLY the type of story they want, that they crave, to further their agenda…….
Coincidences galore – for those who love to “create a crisis” and then never let it “go to waste.”
#justsayin
maybe just maybe if this admin wasn’t so busy working obamas criminal agenda they would have time to do their JOB?
Yes indeed, it’s great fun pointing out that the great big super-wonderful government bureaucracy screwed up once again.
But in the spirit of Never Letting a Crisis Go to Waste, it allows the propagandists to get in two wedges allowing them to further The Agenda;
First, the idea that trivial rubbish like “possession of a controlled substance” is an obvious precursor to Felons Gone Wild, and
Second, that the problem is the time available to the FBI to do the job.
Look for them to push for adding more offenses to the list of those making a citizen ineligible in perpetuity for firearm possession. I expect traffic offenses will be next. Or perhaps membership in some Christian congregation, or donations to a civil-rights group such as the NRA.
And I also expect a stab at eliminating the three-day period entirely; this would of course give the FBI a pocket veto on any gun purchase. Hey, it worked for Massachusetts, at least for a while; the state had one young girl processing licenses, and she only worked part time. The 1998 MA law removed the “grace period”, so that licensees who sent in renewals before their old licenses expired were not covered until their new ones arrived, and when they failed to arrive before the old ones expired, voilà—instant felons. Now that was just too obvious, and it was later changed. But they’ll keep trying.
Nine people, who by all accounts were upstanding citizens I would have felt privileged to know, are dead because Roof was able to buy a gun despite the rules.
This is a tragedy.
Maybe it’s my libertarian leanings, however, that cause me to be worried that his disqualification from gun ownership was based an an ARREST and not a conviction. Even the police report of his admission of guilt, IMHO, should be treated as an allegation until he was tried.
Had the law been followed, there is a chance that the tragedy would not have happened, but I can’t help but be troubled about what this law actually says.
What law wasn’t followed? The “law” is that if the background check isn’t completed in time, the FFL dealer may sell the gun to the applicant. See here: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/federal-firearms-licensees/a-nics-delay
But Director Comey is wrong. Nine times dead wrong.
In this instance, the difference between the killer being a prohibited person and being legally allowed to buy a gun before his trial on drug charges was that R___ admitted to being in possession of Suboxone in the police report.
Yes, the pre-trial classification system that strips Americans of their rights before they are tried in a court of law is just that fragile.
If the killer had simply disputed the charges with a simple “those aren’t my drugs,” he would have been able to still buy the Glock 41 pistol from Shooter’s Choice, even if the background check examiner had all the correct information that Comey is blaming as being the problem now.
—Bob Owens
This killer would have managed to kill in any event. He wasn’t going to be deterred by a law.
The only person deserving blame for the Charleston shooting is Dylann Roof.
We’re a nation of 300 million people. I don’t care how stripped down and efficient a federal agency like the FBI is made to be, it will still be a huge bureaucracy in order to cover such a large population. It will still be run by humans and there will always be mistakes.
Should we feel hypocritial to castigate Obama/Dems/Libs for politicizing the Charleston shooting while at the same time we seek to lay blame for it at the feet of Obama by castigating one of his federal agencies?
Exactly.
This snafu kind of makes one wonder how many other of these shooters have not been properly vetted by the FBI. Maybe this is intentional to make a case for more anti-Second Amendment laws.
100 percent probability!