Guns and People Who Shouldn’t Have Them
The Virginia Tech shootings revealed huge gaps in what is supposed to be a national database of people barred from buying firearms, among them people such as Seung-Hui Cho. The Tech gunman had no trouble legally buying the guns he used, despite an earlier special court finding that Cho was dangerously mentally ill.
The U.S. House passed a bill Wednesday that would help close the data gap and make federal gun control laws more effective nationwide. It’s a good measure that the Senate should pass and the president should sign into law.
Such a law might not have stopped Cho from getting his guns. Though many states submit no mental health data to the federal database, Virginia is not among them. Before the Tech shootings, the state already had one of the best records in the nation for reporting this information.
Cho slipped through a loophole in Virginia’s system, though, because he received an involuntary commitment order to get outpatient, rather than inpatient, treatment.
Gov. Tim Kaine closed the loophole two weeks after the April 16 campus shootings. He ordered state agencies to conform Virginia’s reporting practices to federal law, which prohibits gun sales to all people adjudicated as “mentally defective,” whether institutionalized or not.
Still, Virginia stands to benefit greatly from the House measure because the bill would offer states $250 million a year for three years to improve record-keeping, regularize databases and develop ways to submit relevant records automatically to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Proponents argue that, had the legislation been in place earlier, NICS would have stopped federally licensed firearms dealers from selling guns to Cho: All of the resulting attention to improving the reporting process would have prompted Virginia to see and close its loophole. Maybe.
By now, though, Kaine has done that.
The urgency to pass this legislation comes from a broader national need.
Cho’s crime revealed an easily correctable flaw in Virginia’s reporting practices, and a gaping failure nationwide. Only 23 states were putting any sort of mental health records at all into the background check system.
The Tech mass murder shined a spotlight on an appalling deficiency.
The House bill would correct it by helping states supply necessary information, and threatening them with cuts in federal crime-prevention grants if they don’t comply.
The bill also would improve NICS by specifying how people once entered into the database for mental illnesses could be removed if they are no longer deemed dangerous.
This bill should become law.
(c) 2007 Roanoke Times & World News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.