Falling through cracks
Gun control won’t work unless laws are enforced
While each mass shooting renews calls for more gun control, Friday’s tragedy in Aurora, Ill., focuses attention once again on the importance of enforcing laws already on the books and ensuring that government at all levels commits itself to rigorous enforcement of any new measures signed into law.
No amount of gun-control legislation — not even a ban on assault weapons — will prevent mass shootings if people manage to exploit loopholes or fall through cracks in the nation’s patchwork system of firearms enforcement.
In Aurora, Gary Martin fatally shot five employees at a manufacturing warehouse and wounded a sixth employee and five of the first police officers on the scene. He went on the rampage after learning that he was being fired, and he felled his victims — including an intern on his first day at work — with a gun he shouldn’t have been able to buy because of a 1995 conviction for felony aggravated assault in Mississippi.
However, Martin, who was killed by police at the warehouse, fell through numerous cracks in the system. He bought the handgun in 2014 after somehow passing an initial background check. When he applied for a concealed carry permit, a second, more intensive background check showed that he wasn’t supposed to own any guns, and police ordered him to surrender it. He never did, and police never took it from him.
This is eerily similar to the breakdown that enabled Devin Kelley to buy a rifle and mow down 26 people at a church in rural Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November.
Kelley had committed a string of offenses that got him drummed out of the Air Force and precluded him from owning a gun. However, in a breach of protocol, the Air Force failed to notify the FBI of Kelley’s crimes, so his name never went into a database that dealers check before selling guns and he passed a background check. It turned out that the Defense Department had a history of failing to report people like Kelley to the FBI.
The Aurora case also bears similarities to the deadly confluence of factors that enabled Dylann Roof to buy a gun and kill nine people at a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015, and that enabled Seung-Hui Cho to buy guns that he used to kill 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007. Officials made mistakes in researching Roof’s background and did not complete the check within the required three-day period, allowing him to purchase a handgun. Cho bought two guns despite a record of mental illness because of the way his treatment was categorized in court records.
The pattern here must be broken. The nation’s conversation about gun control must include ways to better enforce existing laws, realizing that small missteps can have big consequences. There should be more coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement and a careful integration of mental health diagnoses and domestic violence records into background check databases. And employers, like the company Martin worked for, must be trained to seek police assistance when they have any reason to believe that a disciplinary proceeding or customer dispute will turn violent.