Shooter got gun at private sale; denied in 2014 check

OD E SSA, T E X A S » The gunman in a West Texas rampage that left seven dead obtained his AR-style rifle through a private sale, allowing him to evade a federal background check that blocked him from getting a gun in 2014 because of a “mental health issue,” a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

The official spoke to The Associated Press on Tuesday on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation. The person did not say when and where the private sale took place.

Officers killed 36-yearold Seth Aaron Ator on Saturday outside an Odessa movie theater after a spate of violence that spanned 10 miles and lasted more than an hour, injuring about two dozen people in addition to the dead. He spread terror across the two biggest cities in the Permian Basin while firing indiscriminately from his car into passing vehicles and shopping plazas. He also hijacked a U.S. Postal Service mail truck, killing the driver.

Ator had tried purchasing a firearm in January 2014 but was denied, the Texas Department of Public Safety said in a statement Tuesday. The agency said it was precluded by law from disclosing why, but the law enforcement official told The Associated Press it was because of a “mental health issue.”

Private sales, which some estimates suggest account for 25% to 40% of all gun sales, are not subject to a federal background check in the U.S. If the person selling the firearm knows the buyer can’t legally purchase or possess a firearm, they would be violating the law. But they are not required to find out if the person can possess a firearm and are not required to conduct a background check.

The so-called “gun show” loophole means that Americans can buy a gun from an individual, get one bequeathed from a relative, obtain one through an online marketplace as well as from some dealers at gun shows — all without needing to go through a federal background check.

FBI special agent Christopher Combs said Ator “was on a long spiral of going down” and had been fired from his oil services job the morning of the shooting, and that he called 911 both before and after the rampage began. Online court records show Ator was arrested in 2001 for a misdemeanor offense that would not have prevented him from legally purchasing firearms in Texas.

Combs said Monday that Ator called the agency’s tip line as well as local police dispatch on Saturday after being fired from Journey Oilfield Services, making “rambling statements about some of the atrocities that he felt that he had gone through.” Fifteen minutes after the call to the FBI, Combs said, a state trooper unaware of the calls to authorities tried pulling over Ator for failing to signal a lane change.

Ator fired on the trooper and fled, setting in motion a rampage that didn’t end until the gunman was killed at 4:17 p.m., according to Odessa police spokesman Steve LeSueur. That was 64 minutes after DPS said the trooper pulled over Ator.

In 2018, more than 26 million background checks were conducted. Of those, fewer than 100,000 were denied with the vast majority of those rejected because the person was found to have a criminal past that made them ineligible. Just over 6,000 were because the person had been involuntarily committed.

Gun rights advocates have pushed back against efforts to include private sales, contending it would risk unwittingly turning someone into a felon for a private transaction with a friend or relative. They also argue that criminals will still get their hands on a firearm, regardless of what laws are on the books.

“In the guise of basically regulating private sales, it creates a mechanism that is so labyrinthian that basically gun owners won’t be able to comply with it,” Michael Hammond, the legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, told The Associated Press.