The Department of Justice filed an appeal last week in an effort to overturn a judgment that found the Air Force 60% responsible for the events surrounding a 2017 church shooting in which a service veteran killed 26 people and injured dozens of others. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history.
The ruling ordered that the federal government pay victims and their families $230 million in compensation for not flagging the shooter to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) after he made threats of violence to his Air Force superiors, assaulted his wife and child, attempted to smuggle firearms onto Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, and escaped from a behavioral health facility while awaiting court-martial in 2012.
The judge in the trial, Judge Xavier Rodriguez, wrote in a July 2021 ruling that “had the Government done its job and properly reported [the shooter's] information into the background check system — it is more likely than not that [the shooter] would have been deterred from carrying out the Church shooting.”
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The shooter purchased weapons between 2014 and 2017, according to CNN, two years after he was court-martialed for the assault.
Shortly after the shooting, the Air Force also acknowledged that “had his information been in the database, it should have prevented gun sales to [the shooter].”
Now, in the wake of…
