Mass murderer Roof got his gun through background check gaps
WASHINGTON — Dylann Roof got the pistol he used to kill nine people in a historic black church in South Carolina without a completed background check because of gaps in FBI databases, legal restrictions on how long the FBI can keep data on gun purchasers and other breakdowns in the system, according to an internal report obtained by CQ Roll Call.
Four years after the 2015 attack at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston — and several more high-profile mass shootings — a bipartisan group of senators is still trying to hammer out a deal with the White House on background check legislation.
Roof, an avowed white supremacist with a history of drug use, obtained a .45-caliber Glock pistol despite a drug arrest that should have blocked the purchase. The FBI began a review of how that happened not long after the shooting.
Recommendations in that 2015 report by the FBI’s Inspection Division included expanding what databases the bureau used for background checks, updating how it requested records from local law enforcement agencies and revising strict internal protocols that the report said hamstrung the process.
The report also said that background checks are “complicated by statutory requirements” and recommended at least three separate times that the bureau “assess the possibility for legislative relief ” to help fix the problems.
Perhaps the most alarming revelation in the report is that 172,879 background checks were never completed in 2014 because they took longer than 90 days, a legal deadline after which the FBI has to stop researching and purge the background check from its systems.
That statistic suggests that the number of guns that wind up in the wrong hands each year because of delays in the background check system could be much higher than previously reported.
Because those uncompleted background checks were purged, there’s no way to know how many hundreds or thousands of customers should have been prevented from purchasing a weapon — or if a purchase was made.
It’s not clear whether the number of purged background checks has improved since 2014. The FBI declined on Tuesday to comment on the report or to release more recent data. Instead, it told CQ Roll Call to submit a public records request. The bureau took, on average, 221 working days to process complex records requests in 2018.
“South Carolinians are completely reliant upon the FBI to properly and safely perform background checks at the point of sale,” said W. Mullins McLeod Jr., a lawyer who represents several families of Charleston victims.
Roof had confessed to drug possession months before the Charleston shooting and should not have been able to legally purchase a firearm under federal law. But the FBI didn’t complete his background check within three business days. A provision in the 1994 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act allowed the dealer to voluntarily proceed with the sale on the fourth day.