I mostly stay out of the gun control debate. I don't think additional gun control laws are needed, at least until we get around to enforcing what's already on the books. In the case of Devin Kelley, the guy who shot up a church outside of San Antonio over the weekend,
we have an apt illustration:
The Texas church shooter shouldn't have been able to legally own a gun.
But an Air Force officer failed to enter Devin Patrick Kelley's domestic violence court-martial into a national database that would have barred him from buying weapons, the Air Force said Monday.
Top Air Force brass ordered a full review of how the service handled Kelley's conviction at a general court-martial in 2012, Ann Stefanek, a spokeswoman for the Air Force, said in a statement Monday.
Based on what we're learning, Kelley was an all-around bad dude:
Kelley, 26, of New Braunfels, Texas, joined the Air Force after graduating from New Braunfels High School in 2009. He trained at Lackland and Goodfellow Air Force bases in Texas, before reporting to his assignment in logistics readiness at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.
In 2012, Kelley was convicted at general court-martial on two charges of assault, the Air Force said. A retired Air Force colonel who supervised prosecutors when Kelley was tried said Kelley was convicted of fracturing his baby stepson's skull and assaulting his first wife, Tessa, at Holloman.
There
was more:
Records show his first wife divorced him in 2012 in New Mexico. "She's very upset," her mother told NBC News, adding that she did not want to speak about him until she was interviewed by law enforcement.
Kelley remarried in Texas in 2014. The status of that marriage was not clear, but authorities said there was a "domestic situation" with his in-laws.
"The suspect's mother-in-law attended this church," Freeman Martin, regional director of the state Department of Public Safety, said at a Monday news conference. "She has received threatening texts from him."
And more still:
Two ex-girlfriends told NBC News that Kelley stalked them after breakups.
"Years after dating me he would try to bribe me to hang out with him," Landry, who met Kelley in church as a teenager, told NBC News in a Facebook message. "He ended up assaulting me. He would stalk me by repeatedly calling me — even prank calling me, saying really weird stuff.
"That was another thing about him — he was very sick in the head...He would tell me very sick strange things," she said, without providing details.
Other people provided details, though:
Brittany Adcock, 22, said she dated Kelley for two months when she was 13 and he was 18.
"At the time I didn't think much into it being so young but now I realize that there's something off about someone who is 18 with someone who is 13," she said.
More than something, although Jerry Lee Lewis might disagree. There's more:
When she broke it off, he continued to harass her, she said.
"He somehow would always find out my number although none of my friends talked to him and he would constantly call me until I blocked his number," she said. "Then I'd get calls from an unknown number so I've had to change my number quite a bit.
"He would offer me money to hang out with him quite a bit. There has been one point that I called the police because he was just calling me so much I wanted to report harassment," Adcock said.
And if you keep reading the linked article, you find out about animal cruelty charges and a host of other offenses. So, this is a dude who didn't have a right to own a gun, but he had one. The argument I'm seeing is that another overlay of laws would have made a difference, but do you really believe that? If so, why?
4 comments:
We've had laws against murder for centuries, yet murders happen all the time. Is a law against having a gun, which already exists, going to prevent murders, when the laws against murder do not?
I saw a pastor friend say, "Congress, it's up to you." And then someone commented, "Do SOMETHING!"
It's an understandable, though naive, form of wishing. If we pass a law then the bad things will stop. If we mandate insurance then people won't get sick. If we give people income assistance they won't be poor. If we get more people into college more people will be educated. If we give poor people home loans they'll become responsible middle class homeowners.
I don't think most people actually want to "grow government" or take over. They want good things and they don't understand how the world actually works. If we had responsible institutions, like journalism for example, much of this would evaporate as people heard that such solutions don't amount to anything. But we have civilization wreckers instead.
I think the Air Force is in big trouble on this one, and quite frankly as a taxpayer, I think some heads need to roll and the victims need to be compensated. I also have to wonder whether this is something of a habit--if you debar people convicted of domestic violence from holding weapons as a rule, you're going to be drumming a LOT of people out of the service. The conflict of interest is clear and needs routine audits, I think.
Not that getting him on the "no go" list for Brady would have prevented this, but at least it would have made it more difficult. I would have to guess that getting semi-auto rifles on the black market is more difficult than cheap guns simply because of cost, and because the owners have a lot more to lose selling to an unqualified buyer.
(or put differently, it's harder to traffic guns in the middle and upper classes than among the poor)
That is correct. Make it unlawful for the law-abiding to get guns and they will get fewer of them. Make it unlawful for criminals to get guns and they will work harder to break the law, so that they can then break the other laws. Frankly, at this point in our legal system, it's magical thinking that one more law matters. It's like TSA screening-- great for inconveniencing everybody EXCEPT for the determined terrorist.
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