How Domestic Violence and Militarism Open the Floodgates to Mass Shootings Like the Texas Massacre

starts at 12:46 in the video

How Domestic Violence and Militarism “Open the Floodgates” to Mass Shootings Like the Texas Massacre

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/7/how_domestic_violence_and_militarism_open?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=16bf9ba2e6-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-16bf9ba2e6-191687121

The 26-year-old white man named Devin Patrick Kelley who allegedly killed 26 people Sunday as they attended church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, had a history of domestic violence. He was court-martialed on charges he repeatedly hit his wife and attacked his stepson. But after he was kicked out of the Air Force with a bad conduct discharge, officials failed to report his crimes to a federal database, so Kelley had no problem buying the gun he used Sunday. We look at the link between mass shootings and domestic violence with Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project, and with Mariame Kaba, an organizer and educator who works on anti-domestic violence programs.

Well, on Monday, Air Force officials admitted they had failed to share information about Kelley’s criminal history with a U.S. law enforcement database that should have blocked him from buying a gun in the United States. Kelley was stationed at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico when he was convicted in 2012 by a court-martial on two charges of domestic assault, after he repeatedly hit, kicked and choked his wife and allegedly threatened her multiple times with loaded and unloaded firearms. He also pleaded guilty to hitting their 18-month-old stepson with such force that it broke the toddler’s skull. Kelley was imprisoned for a year and then thrown out of the Air Force with a bad conduct discharge in 2014. The charges should have prohibited him from buying or owning firearms, but the Holloman Air Force Base Office of Special Investigations reportedly failed to enter Kelley’s domestic conviction into the national background check system used by gun sellers. Police say Kelley went on to buy at least four guns, including the Ruger AR-556 assault-style rifle he reportedly used to massacre 26 people on Sunday. This is FBI agent Christopher Combs.

CHRISTOPHER COMBS: I know there’s a lot of questions about the FBI NICS system and how did the person get the weapons. I can tell you that for the four purchases that he made, the NICS system did their required checks, and there was no prohibitive information in the systems that we checked that said that he could not have purchased that firearm. The three checks that are conducted, one is of NCIC, one is a criminal history check, and another one is an indices on the NICS system itself. So, in all three of those databases, there was not information that we would have said was prohibitive for that man to get the firearm.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, authorities also said Kelley appears to have carried out the massacre because of a domestic dispute he had with his mother-in-law, who was a member of the First Baptist Church but was not present on Sunday. He apparently did kill his grandmother-in-law. This is a spokesman for the Texas Department of [Public] Safety.

FREEMAN MARTIN: One thing everybody wants to know is why did this happen. It’s a senseless crime, but we can tell you that there was a domestic situation going on within this family. The suspect’s mother-in-law attended this church. We know that he had made threatening—she had received threatening texts from him. And we can’t go into details about that domestic situation, that is continuing to be vetted and thoroughly investigated. But we want to get that out there, that this was not racially motivated. It wasn’t over religious beliefs. There was a domestic situation going on within the family.

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