A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected an effort by three major U.S. cities to require the Pentagon to be more vigilant about reporting service members who were disqualified from owning weapons to a national background check system.
By a 3-0 vote, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it lacked jurisdiction to compel the Department of Defense to fix what New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco called a “broken” system, or to supervise improvements to the Pentagon’s “partial and inconsistent reporting.”
The cities sued seven weeks after former Air Force member Devin Kelley killed 26 people on Nov. 5, 2017 at a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church before killing himself.
