An error on the part of US Air Force to enter the Texas gunman’s past criminal record in a national database may have enabled him to pass background checks and buy weapons that he used to wreak havoc in the church Sutherland Springs, killing 26 people and wounding 20 others.
Despite having been court-martialled in 2012 for domestic assault on his wife and stepson leading to a 12-month confinement and bad-conduct discharge from the service in 2014, Kelley managed to buy a military-style rifle and three other guns in the last four years, reports said.
The discovery prompted the Air Force to order an internal investigation as to how it failed to submit to Kelley’s criminal history to the FBI as required under service rules.
Conceding that Kelley was prohibited under federal law from buying or possessing firearms after his 2012 conviction, an Air Force spokeswoman said the Inspector-General of the force has been ordered to conduct a complete review of the Kelley case.
As for the motive behind the Sunday morning massacre, investigators now believe that it may have been possibly due to a “domestic situation”. They spoke of the gunman’s anger against his estranged wife’s mother who usually attends the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, but was not present at the time when he went on the rampage on Sunday. Kelley, it turned out, had been sending “threatening texts” to his mother-in-law.
“This (mass shooting) was not racially motivated, it wasn’t over religious beliefs. There was a domestic situation going on within the family and the in-laws,” Freeman Martin of the Texas Department of Public Safety told reporters.
President Donald Trump, facing renewed questions on the gun control issue at a news conference in Seoul, once again asserted it was not a question of strong gun laws, pointing to the fact that gunman Kelley would have carried on with the massacre if he had not been challenged by a “very brave” armed resident of local community.
“Just remember, if this man (armed resident) didn’t have a gun or rifle, you’d be talking about a much worse situation in the great state of Texas,” he said, adding that Chicago, despite having “the strongest gun laws in our nation” was having the highest gun violence. “Chicago is a disaster. It’s a total disaster,” he said, targeting the Democratic bastion.
Offering similar comments on gun control in Tokyo, where he suggested it was more an issue of the gunman’s mental health, Trump had gone to say: “Fortunately, somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it would have been, as bad it was, it would have been much worse.”
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, however, slammed Trump’s contention, tweeting: “let’s be clear – nobody ‘stopped’ this shooting. 26 people, including little kids, are dead in one of our country’s worst mass killings.” He said the local resident that Trump referred to did not fire at the gunman until the carnage inside the church was over. Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott told CBS News there was evidence that Kelley had mental health problems and had been denied a state gun permit.