Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Air Force bears most of the responsibility for the 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, because it failed to enter the shooter’s criminal history into a federal background check database used for gun purchases.
The decision Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez of the Western District of Texas comes in a civil lawsuit brought by survivors and families of victims of the massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, which left 26 people dead. The 26-year-old gunman, former Airman Devin Kelley, killed himself shortly after the attack, the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history.
In his decision, Judge Rodriguez said the Air Force bore 60% of the responsibility for the shooting and ordered parties to set a trial plan within 15 days to assess monetary damages for the survivors and victims’ families in the case.
“The trial conclusively established that no other individual—not even Kelley’s own parents or partners—knew as much as the United States about the violence that Devin Kelley had threatened to commit and was capable of committing,” the judge wrote. “Moreover, the evidence shows that—had the Government done its job and properly reported Kelley’s information into the background check system—it is more likely than not that Kelley would have been deterred from carrying out the Church shooting.”
Kelley had been convicted in a 2012 general court-martial on two counts of domestic assault on his wife and their child and sentenced to a year in military jail, which should have barred him from legally buying a gun. But the Air Force never entered his conviction into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which gun dealers must use to check for criminal records before selling someone a firearm. As a result, after being thrown out of the military, Kelley was able to purchase a rifle at a gun store, which he later used in the Sutherland Springs shooting.
Federal law bars people with felony convictions, which Kelley’s military case is considered, from owning guns.
“If it wasn’t for these brave families, the government would never have taken or faced responsibility for their negligence,” said Jamal Alsaffar, a lawyer for the families.
The Air Force said it wouldn’t comment because the case is ongoing. The Justice Department, which represented the Air Force in the case, declined to comment.
Victims’ families alleged in the suit that the Air Force’s failure to enter Kelley’s court-martial conviction into the NICS database made it liable for the attack. At the weekslong trial earlier this year, the Air Force admitted that it failed to enter Kelley’s criminal history into the database but argued that Kelley was so bent on violence he would have found a way to buy guns anyway.
“Laws did not stop Devin Kelley,” said Paul Stern, a Justice Department lawyer, during the trial. “Certainly the NICS would not have stopped him.”
Mr. Stern said that even if Mr. Kelley was barred from legally buying a gun, he had plenty of other ways of obtaining one in Texas, including buying a ghost gun kit online, purchasing one at a gun show or forcing his wife to buy him one. He added that the Air Force couldn’t have foreseen that Kelley’s history of domestic violence would be precursors to a mass shooting.
The families’ lawyers countered that Kelley preferred to purchase his firearms through legitimate gun stores and may have been deterred if unable to do so.
They said his well-documented history of violence and legal troubles while serving in the Air Force made its failure to enter his information into the FBI database that much more egregious.
Following Kelley’s court-martial in the domestic-assault case, the military sentenced the then-airman first class to one year in a military jail, a demotion to the rank of airman basic and a bad-conduct discharge.
“If there’s one thing the Air Force knew about Devin Kelley, it’s that he liked extreme forms of violence,” said Mr. Alsaffar at trial.
Judge Rodriguez agreed in his ruling, in which he singled out the Air Force department responsible for investigating crimes committed by airmen and for entering that information into the background-check database.
Experts on gun laws said the case was particularly notable because it highlighted serious flaws in the background-check system for gun purchases and connected them to real-world events more clearly than has been done in a court in the past.
“This is a landmark decision,” said Eric Ruben, assistant professor at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas