McCain: We'll Conduct Oversight Of Air Force Failure To Flag TX Gunman's Past

[DonViejo]

Source: Talking Points Memo


By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published NOVEMBER 7, 2017 8:06 AM
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Monday night that his committee will conduct oversight over the Defense Department’s investigation into the Air Force’s failure to report the Texas shooter’s criminal history to the FBI.

“The Air Force has acknowledged that after court-martialing and convicting the perpetrator on charges of domestic assault, it failed to report the conviction to the FBI,” McCain said in a statement. “The Senate Armed Services Committee will conduct rigorous oversight of the Department’s investigation into the circumstances that led to this failure. It’s critical that each of the military services take the steps necessary to ensure that similar mistakes have not occurred and will not occur in the future.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a member of the Armed Services Committee, also told CNN Tuesday morning that the Senate should investigate the Air Force’s failure and suggested that the reporting failure is part of a large problem.

“There are court-martials, thousands of them, every year, that involve very serious felonies as well as domestic violence misdemeanors. All of them should be reported,” Blumenthal said on CNN’s “New Day.” “The preliminary information available to me is they’re not being reported, and that is a major lapse in the system.”


Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mccain-oversight-air-force-reporting-crime-fbi

[pangaia]

1. Good. I will take whatever I can get from McCain.....

[VermontKevin]

2. Excellent idea. Close loopholes where we can.

[FSogol]

3. Will McCain do it before or after banning bump stocks?

[PSPS]

4. How will he have time? He's already spending all his time inking his rubber stamp.

[riversedge]

5. Glad to see that the Air Force stepped up and took responsibility. Trump could learn from this

them doing so.

[cstanleytech]

6. If its the same level of oversight you have given your party and Donald Sen. McCain then its safe

to say nothing good will come of it.

[Cirque du So-What]

7. A personal tale related to following procedures in the military

In my previous life as a technician in the Navy, one of my duties was making tests on missiles with a multimeter. When measuring resistance, a small current is passes through the circuit, and if the wrong circuit is tested that way, the missile engine could ignite and incinerate the poor sap gazing into the ass-end of the missile. Additionally, all ships in the vicinity had to refrain from operating their radios, as that energy could also trigger the missile engine. Everything depended on a multiple levels of procedures being followed to keep Yours Truly from getting crispy-crittered, including the necessity of having another guy reading the testing instructions aloud to me. I would run all the ways that something could go wrong through my mind while conducting those tests, and I would give thanks to the universe that nothing did go wrong after each time the tests were performed.

Procedures also apply to administrative tasks like making sure someone who has gotten a Bad Conduct Discharge gets reported to the FBI to ensure that barriers to purchasing a weapon are erected. As someone whose life after military service is centered in writing, interpreting, and enforcing procedures, it boggles my mind that administrative tasks do not receive the same attention to detail that technical tasks receive. Lives are no less endangered from failures in one system than another, as recent events have proven.

[Blue_Tires]

10. Holy damn...

These were the BIG missiles?

[Cirque du So-What]

11. As missiles go, they aren't the biggest

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUR-5_ASROC

but it would definitely ruin your day if one ignited in your face.

[Thor_MN]

8. On the day that a major maker of bump stocks resumes sales....

[Paladin]

9. The problem is much bigger than one tragic error by the Air Force.

I hope Senator McCain shines a light on the NRA's long-time efforts to make any sort of national gun transaction reporting system virtually meaningless, in particular the attacks on government agencies on all levels that are responsible for collecting and monitoring such reports.

And I hope none of you will buy into the notion that a properly-rendered Air Force report would have kept this latest mass shooter from getting all the firearms and ammunition he wanted. This is, after all, the United States of America.