On April 11, Dylann Roof took some money his parents had given him for his 21st Birthday and went to Shooter's Choice, a gun shop in West Columbia, South Carolina.
There he purchased a Glock Model 41 pistol chambered for .45 ACP ammunition.
The Glock 41 is a relatively large pistol that Glock recommends as a duty weapon for police and military use. It is also recommended for sport shooting and hunting.
Oddly enough, it is not recommended for first-time gun buyers.
As required by federal law, the gun store employee that sold the gun to Roof processed a background check through the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) system maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The gun store employee received a "Proceed" from NICS and completed the sale.
We have no idea of the price Roof paid for his pistol but the suggested retail price is $635.00. However, firearms are often discounted and the Glock 41 is actually one of the less expensive .45-caliber pistols available today.
On June 17, Roof took the pistol to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and shot 10 people, killing nine.
Following the shooting, many asked how Roof obtained the gun and early accounts said it had been given to him by his father, which we now know to be incorrect.
In addition, many, including President Obama, called for new gun control laws, including broadening the scope of background checks.
One question that many people, including myself, asked was how Dylann Roof could buy a gun and pass a background check when he was under indictment for a felony and a drug-related felony, at that.
As was the case about the widely reported story that the gun was a "gift" from his father, it turns out the reports were incorrect.
The Columbia, South Carolina, daily newspaper, The State, reviewed the arrest warrant issued in connection with the charge of illegal possession of Suboxone and found that the charge was a misdemeanor, not a felony. While Roof may have committed a federal offense by stating he was not an unlawful user of, or addicted to, alcohol or illegal drugs, officials say that is impossible for a background check to verify. Roof had not been convicted of the offense, which is the legal standard, at the time he completed the BATFE Form 4473.
Incidentally, Glock is a popular brand of handgun. In addition to being carried by more American law enforcement officers than any other brand, Glocks were used by James Holmes, Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner. Ironically, one of Loughner's victims, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, also owned a Glock. Elliott Rodger had a Glock among the collection he was toting around Isla Vista.
In the eulogy he delivered at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, President Obama said, "None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy.
"It will not. People of good will will continue to debate the merits of various policies as our democracy requires — the big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates.
"Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again."
The President is correct. Gun safety measures won't prevent every tragedy. Even in places where controls are tighter than they are in the U.S. They didn't stop gunmen in France at Charlie Hebdo or the Hypercachet food market; they didn't stop Seifeddine Rezgui from gunning down 38 people at Sousse, Tunisia. They didn't stop Anders Brevik from killing dozens of people in Norway, either.
But it's pretty clear that one law that is championed by just about everyone doesn't work at all: background checks. Holmes, Loughner and Rodger, along with Jiverly Wong, Karl Pierson, Aaron Alexis, Ivan Lopez, Seung-Hui Cho, or Nidal Hasan, passed one or more background checks.
What's true for background checks is true for all the recently introduced measures like licensing and mandatory insurance policies.
The problem with keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them is the fact that we don't know who those people are and we don't really have any way of identifying them until they show up and begin shooting.
Sure, some of the killers have shown signs of problems before they committed their murders, but did anyone tell the police? Did anyone try to refer them to competent medical care? Did anyone do anything that might result in the killer being on the prohibited list?
A gun store owner has no way of knowing whether a customer just posted some apocalyptic manifesto on Facebook or has been acting more strangely than usual. Neither does the NICS. Neither do they have any way of knowing that the person buying the firearm isn't buying for someone that can't buy on their own, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
There are calls for requiring registration of all firearms. Based on recent experience, that doesn't seem to be working too well, either. Following passage of the SAFE Act in New York State, owners of certain weapons and high-capacity magazines were required to register them with the state. Recently released figures from the New York State Police show that only about four percent of the estimated firearms have been registered and no one knows what the percentage is for high-capacity magazines, which aren't even traceable to the point of purchase. Connecticut's rate is somewhat higher: perhaps 20%, depending on the estimated number of military-style rifles that in the possession of state residents.
If you take the Connecticut percentage and apply that to the number of firearms owned by civilians in the U.S., you wind up with 200 million to perhaps 240 million unregistered guns.
Perhaps it's time we focused less on how Dylann Storm Roof got his Glock and more on why he got it and, even more important, why he used it.
You will never make any headway against gun violence by focusing on the gun. You're pursuing an adjective rather than focusing on the noun.