FBI mistake allowed Charleston shooter to buy gun
The white gunman who killed nine African American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, last month was able to buy a gun because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made mistakes during his background check.
Despite having previously admitted to drug possession, Dylann Roof, 21, was allowed to buy a handgun because of mistakes by FBI agents, a failure by local prosecutors to respond to a bureau request for more information about his case, and a weakness in federal gun laws, FBI director James Comey said on Friday.
"We are sick that this has happened. We wish we could turn back time," he said. “We wish we could turn back time. From this vantage point, everything seems obvious.”
Roof, an avowed white supremacist, shot dead nine black worshipers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on June 17.
The FBI runs federal background checks for gun dealers in about 30 states, including South Carolina. If the agency does not report back to a firearms retailer within three business days, US law allows a gun to be sold.
Roof exploited the three-day waiting period that has allowed thousands of prohibited gun buyers to legally purchase firearms over the past decade in the US, where some of those weapons were ultimately used in crimes.
A female examiner at the FBI’s national background check center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, began investigating Roof’s criminal history two days after the white supremacist tried to buy the weapon.
The examiner found that Roof had been arrested in February on a felony drug charge, but not convicted. The drug charge alone would not have prevented him from buying the gun under federal law, but Roof's admission, contained in the Columbia Police Department's arrest report, would have.
Shortly after the FBI report about the gun purchase was released, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, gun control advocates and the powerful gun lobby began wading into the matter.
“We simply cannot have such failures in our background check system, and peoples’ lives are at stake. Clearly, more oversight is needed,” said US Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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