The whole background check thing is dumb. Does anyone really think this guy would have said "Well the NICS check said I can't buy a gun from the store, I guess my plan to kill people is foiled..." ?
I agree with this too, but the whole incident shows it to be twice as stupid as originally thought- not only does it not block on that front; but in the weird stupid ****ing corner case that it was designed to do something- it FAILED miserably, LOL.
Actually this entire thing is a graphic episode of "Why the general public should never, ever trust the government to protect them from danger". In this incident the government failed
-WRT his service the .gov probably failed at least once, if not possibly multiple times, incarcerate this POS. Strike one.
-Guy escapes looney bin thing, gov does nothing. Strike two.
-Guy buys guns because some government lackey forgot to put shit in a computer, or this simply never happened because his "conviction" was on the edge and not quite at the bar for DQ. Strike three.
Although in the third case, as you correctly state- it probably wouldn't have mattered anyways- particularly given that the felony trap of "prohibited person trying to buy a gun" = Jail is almost never enforced (if someone looks at NICS confirmed denials # and correlates the denial # to a number of gun cases where someone went to prison, unless the buyer has an open warrant on them or something. (which adds an extra, easier to convict felony to the pile), I doubt that number is anywhere near the number of confirmed denials. It's probably a fraction of a percent. So even if this guy DID get flagged by NICS, the odds of him actually being arrested for an attempt are probably lost in the noise.... (at least if someone argued that a violent PP getting thrown in jail could have stopped something, thats at least slightly credible... but this literally almost never happens in reality. ) All of this compounds into - "NICS is just feel good bullshit. " like the rape scanners on the airplanes, etc. It's just a very early form of security theater that even in the NRA participated in, in a vain attempt to make morons "feel good" about "doing something" about "stopping bad guys from getting guns" etc.
I know you know this - but others reading may not know that BATFE doesn't really prosecute straws and PPs attempting to buy firearms at any statistically meaningful rate. If you start digging into the raw numbers, there enforcement appears to basically be a joke. Federal prisons are not filled with tons of people who tried to straw for someone, nor are they filled with prohibited persons whose offense was attempting to buy a handgun as a prohibited person...
I guess we might call that STRIKE FOUR against .gov bullshit.
-Mike