Judge dismisses Charleston church shooting lawsuits

CHARLESTON, S.C.—A federal judge has dismissed 16 lawsuits by survivors and victims in the 2015 Charleston church massacre but also said bureaucratic “nonsense” caused the gun background check system to fail, allowing Dylann Roof to get a gun to carry out his killings.

In his 22-page order, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel called the FBI’s background check system “disturbingly superficial” and “obstructed by policies that deny the overworked and overburdened examiners access to the most comprehensive law enforcement federal database.”

Roof would not “have obtained approval to purchase the murder weapon if the examiner could have accessed” the most comprehensive law enforcement crime database, called N-DEx, Gergel wrote.

Under federal law, people can’t buy a firearm if they have been charged with a felony drug violation.

Roof, then 20, had been arrested by the Columbia Police Department at Columbiana Mall on Feb. 28, 2015, for felony drug possession.

Although Columbiana Mall is within the city limits of Columbia, it is surrounded by Lexington County. The Columbia Police Department makes arrests in the mall, but the 11th Circuit Solicitor’s office, which has jurisdiction over Lexington County, prosecutes cases made from those arrests. Because of the different jurisdictions, the federal employee doing the background check could not find records of Roof’s drug arrest.