MSNBC host, top House Dem peddle misleading info about waiting periods to legally purchase guns

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MSNBC host Ali Velshi allowed House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., to share discredited claims that a longer waiting period to buy a gun would have prevented Dylann Roof from committing the Charleston massacre in 2015.

"I want to remind people of something called the Charleston loophole… It was this idea that, when you go to buy a gun, the system basically has three days to approve you," Velshi said on Saturday. "If it doesn't do it in the three days for any reason -- if you don't get a denial within three days, but you don't get an approval -- you can just buy the gun anyway."

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MSNBC host Ali Velshi allowed Jim Clyburn to spout discredited claims that a longer waiting period would have prevented murderer Dylann Roof from killing nine people.

Clyburn told viewers that Roof got a gun in only three days, noting that 97 percent of potential gun owners are approved in the three-day window and "many" of the remaining three percent go out and commit murders.

"What we have found is that, in that three percent, a lot of people -- the vast majority of that three percent are people who get the guns who do not deserve to have them -- who are not qualified to have them -- and many of them go out and commit murders like this gentleman did in Charleston," Clyburn said. "So we're trying to close that -- put in something that gives us 10 days in which to do the work."

Velshi did not ask a follow-up question related to his comment, instead asking about the enhanced background check process and noting that "most" mass shootings involve an assault weapon.

"Velshi not only cued up Clyburn to make discredited claims that a 10-day waiting period could have stopped mass murderer Dylann Roof from getting a gun, but the MSNBC host also wrongly claimed that most mass shootings are committed using so-called ‘assault weapons,’" Media Research Center contributor Brad Wilmouth wrote.

Wilmouth has been calling out misinformation related to the "Charleston loophole" for years. In 2019 when he covered a different MSNBC host making a similar mistake, he cited a 2015 Washington Post article that debunked misinformation that Roof had been arrested for a felony – something that would have come up during a longer background check.

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"Fact checkers on both the left and right have disputed the claim that Roof could have been legally prevented from buying a gun with a longer background check," Wilmouth wrote, noting that Newsweek recently debunked Velshi’s statement that "most" mass shootings involve assault weapons.

Roof became the first person to be sentenced to death for a federal hate crime after he killed nine Black church members in Charleston. The slain included the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church's pastor and a state senator; a high school track coach; the church sexton; a librarian; and an aspiring poet.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.