US military police often failed to provide fingerprints and other information to federal officials after personnel were convicted by courts-martial, a Pentagon watchdog said Tuesday, meaning disgraced ex-troops could have illegally bought guns. The issue of former service members illegally buying weapons has come to the fore after it emerged that an ex-airman who carried out a mass shooting in Texas last month bought firearms despite a court-martial conviction for domestic assault.
The Pentagon's Inspector General conducted an evaluation of military police across all the services to see if they had been updating a federal database with the fingerprints and outcomes of military criminal convictions. For the years 2015 and 2016, the inspector looked at 2,502 cases and found that in 601 cases, no fingerprint cards were submitted to a federal database designed to block felons buying weapons, and in 780 cases (31 percent) no "final dispositions" - or case conclusions - were reported. "Any missing fingerprint card and final disposition report can have serious, even tragic, consequences, as may have occurred in the recent church shooting in Texas," the report states.
"The failure to populate FBI databases with all the required fingerprint records can result in someone purchasing a weapon who should not." Devin Kelley, the shooter in the November 5 attack at a Texas church that killed 26 people and wounded 20 more, was convicted by court-martial in 2012 of two charges of domestic assault against his wife and stepson.
The Inspector General report predates the shooting. But since the incident, the service branches are looking through old cases to see if any information was not reported. The Air Force last week said that so far, it had found "several dozen" cases that needed fixing and reporting.
Despite America's lax gun laws, convicted felons are usually not allowed to own guns. Licensed sellers are supposed to check national databases under the 1993 Brady Act, aimed at reducing handgun violence.
But even this basic requirement can be flouted by private sellers, who do not have to conduct background checks.
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