In 2017, a dishonorably discharged Air Force “veteran” killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Despite his discharge status, he was able to walk into a gun store and purchase a firearm. Twice.
A dishonorable discharge is basically a felony conviction. You have to be a vile piece of filth to get one of those, and most people get booted from the military before they ever hit that point, but this particular killer deserved it and more. Still, the DOD didn’t submit his name to the NICS database.
It caused a lot of problems, and a measure was passed to fix this problem. Now, the background check system is a system you can trust to, if not always get it right, to at least include everyone who is prohibited.
Right?
Right?
Uh…guys? It gets that part right now, doesn’t it?
Oh, I guess not.
In a stunning admission, the Los Angeles County Superior Court has revealed that it failed to report hundreds of thousands of criminal case outcomes to the California Department of Justice—including roughly 147,000 felony convictions.
Let that sink in.
For decades—stretching back to the 1980s—criminal records simply weren’t entered into the system that feeds background checks.
No alerts.
No safeguards.
No accountability.Just a broken government system quietly failing in the background while politicians demanded more gun control.
A System That Only Works “If Everything Goes Right”
Here’s the part they don’t want to talk about:
The entire background check system depends on perfect data entry, flawless coordination, and bureaucratic competence at every level of government.
And as this case proves—that’s a fantasy.
Couple this with the well-documented problem of false positives, where law-abiding folks are flagged because of similar names or because they were the victim of identity theft or whatever other reasons, and we’ve got a system that doesn’t work for crap.
As noted above by Texas Gun Rights, the entire system is built on everything working exactly right. For it to work, every name has to be included in the database and, perhaps more importantly, every other name needs to be excluded. We know that the exclusions weren’t working, and it was easy to believe that the Sutherland Springs killer was an anomaly, but the LA County Courts haven’t been inputting the names of convicted felons for decades?
Part of me would love to just chalk this up to incompetence, rather than maliciousness. After all, I do try not to ascribe things to malice that can be adequately explained via stupidity or laziness, but at a certain point, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
This is one of those times, really.
How many felons were able to keep buying guns simply because the LA County Superior Court couldn’t be bothered to do its job, only to commit crimes and then make lawful gun buyers look bad? Was this the goal, or was it simply someone not wanting to bother with the hassle of inputting names?
It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
A more interesting question is how many other courts around the country have done the same thing?
Somehow, I doubt we’re going to like that answer, even if we’re not fans of background check requirements. After all, when they screw up, we end up having to pay the price somehow.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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