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Gun control: How felons could still buy firearms in Ohio

Without an up-to-date background check system, a gun shop owner would have no way of knowing a buyer is legally prohibited from purchasing a gun.

COLUMBUS - In Ohio, a convicted felon barred from owning a gun could still purchase one after passing a background check – all because dozens of courts have failed to upload some paperwork.

Sound familiar? A similar glitch allowed Devin Kelley, a dishonorably discharged U.S. Air Force veteran, to purchase the gun he used to kill 26 and injure 20 more at a South Texas church last year. In that instance, the military failed to flag Kelley as a person banned from owning a gun.

In Ohio, court officials across the state have behaved similarly, failing to submit names to the country's gun-purchase background check system, an Enquirer review of records from the Ohio attorney general's office found.

MORE | Gov. John Kasich wants fix now on loophole that helps felons get guns

State law requires courts to update the list of individuals barred from buying firearms at least once a week. But some courts went months or years without an update – without facing any repercussions, according to state audits. See which courts in your area were delinquent here.

Without an up-to-date background check system, a gun shop owner would have no way of knowing a buyer is legally prohibited from purchasing a gun. Each court delay in submitting a name increases the risk that someone purchases a gun illegally, someone who may already have a history of violence. It's hard to say how many names were held off the system over the years.

"That’s part of the scary part. We just do not know," said former state Sen. Nina Turner, a Cleveland Democrat, who belongs to a group convened by Gov. John Kasich to discuss possible changes to Ohio's guns policies.

'It would take too much time'

In the past three years, at least 90 Ohio courts have gone months without reporting people who are prohibited from owning a gun. Of those delinquent courts, 15 were common pleas courts, which handle the state's most serious offenses. Some courts didn't report names for more than a year.

Their excuses? A court official in East Cleveland said she was too busy to report people banned from owning a gun or even to allow the state to pick up the paperwork to enter names into the database manually.

"It would take too much time to go through the paperwork and her court does not have the money to make that many copies," a state audit reported in March 2017.

Court officials in Oakwood, a city outside Dayton, had put paperwork in a drawer and done nothing with it for months, a state audit reported last November. The Cleveland Municipal Court had not reported convictions for months because its password expired, according to state records from November 2016. The state's worst offender was Marion County's Common Pleas Clerk of Court. Five times in two years, officials from the attorney general's office called the court, wondering why they had gone months without submitting any names to the background checks system. Marion County staff complained of technology problems and insufficient personnel to complete the task. Staff repeatedlyrefused help from the state.

The court's clerk, Julie Kagel, is in charge of the filing. She acknowledged the court had periods of several months in which it did not send in names. Mailing paper submission is "cumbersome," Kagel told The Enquirer, but last fall, the court started doing so about every other week. Kagel said she hopes to send names weekly by mid-March, once the court's electronic system is set up.

As to the risk that a convicted felon is able to buy a gun because of the court's delay, Kagel said: "It's something that concerns me at any time."

Shoddy reporting like that in Marion has no excuse, said Cindy Mollenkopf, president of the Ohio Clerk of Courts Association and clerk in Van Wert County. Courts that don't report create a safe haven for felons looking to purchase guns, and that should concern residents in those counties, she said.

“You see what happened with the Air Force when they didn’t enter (the Texas church shooter’s) information,” Marion Sheriff Tim Bailey said. “It allows someone who has already exhibited criminal behavior to fall through the cracks and buy a gun.”

How to lose your gun rights

Under Ohio law, if you are accused of a violent crime, convicted of a drug offense, found to be a chronic alcoholic or sentenced for domestic violence – even a misdemeanor-level offense – you lose the right to purchase or possess a gun.

For example, Quentin Smith, who is accused of fatally shooting two Westerville police officers this month, was prohibited from having a gun because of a prior burglary conviction. Smith got around that ban by asking a friend to purchase the gun for him.

When someone is convicted – or in some cases, indicted – of a disqualifying offense, a local court is supposed to report that name to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation within a week. With an online system, this takes about five minutes, Mollenkopf said. Sending in paper copies via postal mail could take longer.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation uses that state database for its background checks on guns.

The penalty for delay? Nothing.

If courts delay, the convicted person's name won't appear in a national database that gun shops use before clearing a customer to purchase a firearm. The state's database is also used in background checks for schools, foster parents, concealed handgun licenses and private employers.

But Ohio law contains no penalty for courts that fail to make timely submissions to the background check system.

The Bureau of Criminal Investigation calls delinquent courts and offers to help them, but has limited authority over local court officials, spokesman Dan Tierney said. "We don’t have a state agency that oversees local officials. Clerks are kind of their own entity."

Karen Huey, assistant superintendent of BCI, said she was not aware of any felons obtaining guns because of spotty reporting from courts.

Delays from Ohio's courts isn't anything new. In 2011, more than one-fourth of felony convictions weren't reported to state officials to disqualify felons from obtaining guns, according to a November 2015 report on the problem.

After complaints, the Ohio Supreme Court and BCI created the electronic system to allow local courts to upload lists of disqualified people automatically. It launched in 2015, and local courts needed only to opt-in.

The problem? Some courts' technology doesn't work with the state's new system. Only 47 of the state's more than 350 common pleas, municipal and county courts report their convictions automatically using this tool, an Ohio Supreme Court spokeswoman said.

Kasich's guns policy group, which could share recommendations as early as this week, is discussing ways to force courts to comply with the law. Possibilities include giving courts time to upgrade technology or get up-to-date on submissions to the system, then threatening to withhold state money from counties that are failing to add names to the background-check system.

Kasich hopes to release recommendations quickly in the wake of this month's school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Other ideas include increasing the penalties for people who buy guns for someone who can't have one and those convicted of domestic violence. Kasich's group also might ask lawmakers to allow police to take guns away from people who have threatened gun violence.

"This is our window of opportunity if we ever had one," said Turner, the former state representative.

The Marion Star's Sarah Volpenhein contributed to this report.

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