The U.S. military failed to submit the conviction record of Texas church gunman Devin Patrick Kelley to the FBI following a 2013 court-martial conviction, The Wall Street Journal reports.
This mistake by the U.S. military could explain why the Texas church attacker was allowed to purchase guns in more recent years, The Journal adds. Kelley purchased one gun in 2016 and another this year at two different Academy Sports + Outdoors shops in San Antonio, according to a spokeswoman for the retailer. In both cases, Kelley’s request to purchase the guns went through the FBI’s national background-check system, known as NICS.
In 2013, Kelley was convicted in a general court-martial on two counts of domestic assault on his spouse and their child, and the military sentenced him to one year in a military jail, a demotion to the rank of airman and a bad conduct discharge.
Based on that plea, Kelley would be likely disqualified from possessing a weapon under a 1996 amendment to the Federal Gun Control Act that restricts guns from anyone convicted of a crime of domestic violence, according to Eric Carpenter, a former Army prosecutor and defense counsel, The Journal writes.
The Defense Department is supposed to feed court-martial information into the NICS database, which is then used to prevent individuals with certain criminal histories or mental-health problems from purchasing firearms, The Journal notes. However, the U.S. military didn’t submit Kelley’s name to NICS, and the reasons for this mistake weren’t immediately clear.
“Initial information indicates that Kelley’s domestic-violence offense was not entered into the National Criminal Information Center database by the Holloman Air Force Base Office of Special Investigations,” said Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman.
The Defense Department also is expected to announce a review across the services into how the U.S. military ensures such cases reach NICS, with the department’s inspector general expected to lead the investigation, The Journal informs.
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