Broken Checks

It doesn’t have to be the only change that comes out of the Texas shooting, but it’s a must-do: The feds and the states need to review and repair everything involved in gun-related background checks.

This latest shooter wasn’t the only one who should’ve been unable to legally buy a gun: Dylann Roof also slipped through the cracks in advance of the Charleston slaughter — also in a church.

“We are all sick that this has happened,” then-FBI chief Jim Comey said afterward: Screw-ups between federal and state workers had let Roof buy a handgun weeks before his June 2015 attack.

Now an Air Force failure to report to the National Crime Information Center about Devin Kelley’s court-martial for domestic abuse (which should have disqualified him) let him pass his own background checks.

Comey vowed to “get better” back then; the Air Force is taking its own steps now. But these two highest-possible-profile cases tell you the system must be full of holes. Wouldn’t it be nice to find and fix at least some of the others before more blood is shed?

America can also argue about new gun controls, better mental-health care and so on. But our governments have to get better at enforcing the laws we already have, and that starts with fixing background checks.

With Congress generally paralyzed, it’s up to President Trump to name a task force (with experts on both technology and bureaucracy) to clean up and improve the whole system.

Let’s make background checks great again.