Quote of the Day
A District Court ruled in 2021 that the government was 60% responsible for the massacre after shooter Devin Kelley, who was discharged from the Air Force after a felony conviction, wasn’t entered into the national database that would have prevented him from buying a gun. A judge said the government also owed victims $230 million in damages.
But in court documents filed this week, the Department of Justice pushed back on paying damages and denied that they were primarily responsible for the shooting — a move that gun control advocates say not only harms victims and their families, but is also a backwards step for the Biden administration’s own stance on gun control policy.
NPR
January 14, 2023
DOJ appeal in Texas mass shooting case pleases NRA and puzzles gun control advocates
The issue is the DOJ is claiming the government failure to put the perp into the NICS database does not make them liable for the massacre. This can be interpreted to mean they know background checks do not make the public safer. Hence, background checks are either intended for something other than public safety (such as creating a backdoor registration of guns) and/or a waste of public resources.
Sounds like a variation on “no duty to protect”.
Exactly. And I would posit that at this point the government will give any excuse, no matter how asinine it appears. Illegal or illogical.
Bureaucracy is always about rewarding your equally useless friends and family with money and power.
It seems to me background checks were never intended to do anything else.
The purpose of bureaucracy is to increase the size of the bureaucrat’s empire. Furthering the marketing purpose of the organization is actually a non-goal, for the simple reason that delivering that alleged purpose would remove the rationale for the bureaucracy’s existence. Instead, each agency strives NOT to deliver, and to use its failure to deliver as justification for more staff and more of our money.
Breaking news from 1994.