Turtle Talk

Here’s a Seattle Times article about the fact that the gun Jaylen Fryberg used to shoot himself and several classmates in Marysville, Washington last fall was purchased illegally by his father. The father was subject to a permanent tribal restraining order for a domestic assault in 2002. Although the 2002 domestic assault predated the amendment to the federal law (see 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(33)) that disallowed those convicted in tribal court for domestic violence crimes from owning guns, the elder Fryberg had been convicted of violating the restraining order after that amendment became effective. Therefore, the problem appears to have been that the tribal court information did not make it into the federal database.