The U.S. Air Force had at least two chances to stop the Texas shooter from buying guns. According to government officials and military documents, Devin Kelley was accused of a violent offense in 2012 and two years later the authorities missed a third chance to fag him after Pentagon inspection of cases missed the shooter. The Air Force admitted this week that it hadn’t given the required information about the criminal history of the shooter to the criminal databases of FBI.
Reuters reviewed Department of defense procedures and reported that the military flagged Kelley two times after he was accused of beating his wife and his stepson. At the time the shooter was serving at a New Mexico base. According to Pentagon rules, Kelley should have been registered into the national criminal databases used for background checks. That should have been done by the Air Force right after the shooter had been charged. Kelley should have been flagged that year, after the court-martial assault conviction. The conviction permanently disqualified Kelley from legally obtaining a weapon.
“That is what the investigation is looking at now,” Brooke Brzozowske, an Air Force spokeswoman, said as a confirmation of the procedures that should have happened.
The FBI also confirmed it never got the shooter’s records. It is still not clear whether Kelley committed the attack with the guns he bought in 2016 and this year from a store in Texas, but it is clear that he would not be able to buy guns legally if the Air Force flagged him to the Bureau.
Kelley was also not flagged in 2014 when inspector general Jon Rymer from the FBI pointed that the Air Force wasn’t sending criminal records to the FBI. He urged them to correct that mistake in old cases like the one of the Texas shooter. Rymer looked at 358 convictions against Air Force employees in the period between June 2010 and October 2012. According to his report, in one third of the cases, fingerprints and court-martial outcomes were not passed on to the FBI. But, Kelley had luck because he was convicted in November 2012, only a few days after the sample period ended. The inspector general’s office said that the military should have done something after the report.
Now it is not clear whether Kelley’s fingerprints were even collected in 2012 when he was accused of assault and if they were collected, what happened with them.
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