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Hillary Clinton says background check of Charleston church shooter wasn't 'fast enough'
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton defended her call for stricter gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.
Clinton’s Republican rivals have criticized her for pushing gun control following a terrorist attack. But lax firearms laws, Clinton said on ABC’s This Week, allow people on the no-fly list to purchase guns, just as they enabled Dylann Roof, accused of killing nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church attack in June.
"(Roof) should have never have been given a gun, but the universal background check was not fast enough," Clinton said Dec. 6. "We should be able to approach both of these with some sense of, you know, unity about how we prevent terrorist attacks and how we prevent the wrong people from getting ahold of guns."
Is Clinton right that this system didn’t catch the Charleston shooter in time? She omits some important details in her description, but it largely checks out.
Under current federal law, the FBI performs background checks on would-be gun buyers in South Carolina and 29 other states through its National Instant Criminal Background Check System (the rest of the states do their own background checks). If the check isn’t denied or completed in three days, the gun seller can proceed with the sale.
What happened in Roof’s case comes down to clerical errors.
Here’s how FBI Director James Comey explained why Roof’s background check wasn’t finished in time to prevent his purchase of a .45-caliber Glock pistol.
Roof tried to buy a handgun in West Columbia, S.C., a suburb of Columbia, on April 11. A West Virginia-based FBI examiner began vetting him the next business day, April 13, and found that Roof had been arrested for a felony drug charge March 1 (the charge was later corrected as a misdemeanor). Because the records didn’t show a conviction, the examiner couldn’t deny the purchase but continued to look into Roof’s criminal history.
Roof’s rap sheet mistakenly listed the neighboring county’s sheriff office as the agency that arrested him, leading the FBI examiner to request more information on Roof from the wrong county sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices. The examiner then contacted the West Columbia police, who replied they had no records of Roof’s arrest. Had the database listed the correct police station (Columbia) or included the report in which Roof admitted to possessing drugs, things would have turned out different, according to Comey.
"If a NICS examiner saw that, Roof would be denied permission to buy a gun. But the examiner never saw that," he said.
When the three days were up on April 16, the case was still listed as "pending" and Roof was able to purchase the gun. Two months later, on June 17, Roof allegedly shot and killed nine worshippers and injured one in a historically black church in Charleston.
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