“When do we say enough is enough?” asked California Senator Kamala Harris after Devon Patrick Kelley murdered 26 churchgoing Texans in cold blood, last Sunday.
“The terrifying fact is that no one is safe so long as Congress chooses to do absolutely nothing in the face of this epidemic,” argued Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.
President Trump, on the other hand, not only pointed out that criminals will violate gun laws to acquire weapons, he speculated that had Stephen Willeford, the former National Rifle Association instructor, not come upon the scene, armed, “instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”
After previous mass shootings, Democrats pushed legislation that, even if it had been the law, would not have prevented that particular killer from obtaining the weapons. This time it’s different, since the killer should not, by current law, have been allowed to purchase the firearms he used. Kelley’s conviction for domestic violence, while serving in the Air Force, disqualified him.*
But the Air Force did not do its job, failing to report his record to the FBI. So the background check found . . . nothing.
“The Pentagon has known for at least two decades about failures to give military criminal history information to the FBI,” the Associated Press informed, “including the type of information the Air Force didn’t report about the Texas church gunman. . . .”
The Obama administration, through its command of the military, failed to execute the law designed to keep guns out of dangerous hands. And it sounds like this failure dates back to Bush and Clinton days.
Where does the buck stop?
We don’t need gun control; we need government control.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Note also that the murderer, as Ben Shapiro recounted at National Review: “escaped from a mental institution in 2012, threatened his superior officers and attempted to smuggle weapons onto a military base to carry out those threats, cracked the skull of his infant stepson, beat his wife, abused a dog.”
