Checkered background checking
Apr 19, 2007 Americana, Lex scripta
Did you wonder about this minor detail: That Seung-Hui Cho was pretty much worked up by “mental health professionals” and yet got an instant green light on his federal “background check” before buying the guns he used to commit 30 murders? I’m sure you did. Here’s how:
A court-ordered mental health evaluation of Virginia Tech mass-murderer Seung-Hui Cho in December 2005 found him “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization” and “an imminent danger to self and others.” But that never showed up in computer records when he went to buy his gun.
“We ran a state police background check,” said Roanoke Firearms store owner John Markell, whose store sold Cho a Glock 19 handgun. “It came back clean.”
Federal law is fairly clear. According to the “Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act” that became law in 1993, anyone who “[h]as been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution” is prohibiting from purchasing a firearm.
The definition of a “mental defective” includes anyone whom “a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority” has determined to be “a danger to himself or other” because of “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”
Cho might seem to qualify as a “mental defective” by that definition, but FBI spokesman Steve Fischer said it’s up to each state to determine who qualifies a “mental defective.” And Virginia chooses to draw its lines in a way that didn’t include Cho, even though he was found “mentally ill” and “a danger to self and others.”
That sounds kind of like some bad line drawing. Very, very bad.
This has very little to do with gun control and everything to do with the very delicate interlocking relationships between civil liberties, mental health, medicine, government, finance — and the people who wear the hats with all those names on them.
Still, if you have a standard, regardless of what words are used to label it, that is the mental-health criterion for whether someone is allowed to buy a gun, and some government agency, somewhere, makes a finding that a given person is “mentally ill” and “a danger to self and others,” it’s just negligent not to recognize that this criterion has been met — and to apply it.
And gun control advocates, here’s where you chime in and say: This is just another example of what happens when we depend on government to protect us (new link) whether on guns or anything else. “Don’t worry,” says the state. “One thing we can promise you is no nuts are going to buy guns legally any more.”
“Don’t worry” is what children, husbands and the government say when you should “Worry.”
UPDATE: Krauthammer deals with some of the issues (via Insty).
April 20th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Ron: Point taken. The issue, I believe, is one still unresolved within the mental health profession. It’s wrapped around the axles of civil liberties, colored with historic abuse of commitment, and a not-unusual legislative effort to have the rule apply to the most extreme, but not someone like ‘Uncle Bill, who’s a little whacked sometimes, but generally a good guy. Don’t want to make his life worse/less happy.’ I think finance probably has the least to do with it.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Ron,
does this then advocate a broader or narrower role of government in gun control? The facts certainly suggest that Virginia was negligent in providing gun salesmen with the facts necessary to make an informed decision about who to sell or not sell a gun to. But you then seem to make the jump to say that “this is what happens when we depend on the government to tell us how to make this decision.” Who, then, should we be turning to? What changes are the prudent ones to make?
April 20th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Zach, the government should not undertake to do something and then fail to do it right. I don’t know the right answer, because I am not a full-bore Second Amendment enthusiast. I am in favor of very little gun control but don’t believe having everyone pack heat, all the time and everywhere is a policy. I also don’t want loonies buying guns. I think the problem here is fundamentally that the law has a hard time dealing with the many gradations, as John is saying, too, of nuttiness (including those so slight as my own). But I think even keeping existing law, which unlike some perhaps I do not think is unsatisfactory, in place, I am not recommending broader — just better.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Well, most of us full bore pro-2A people don’t want the mentally ill having guns either. Most of us don’t mind/even support background checks as a concept.
Execution is seriously screwed up when a vengeful ex-girlfriend can go and lie to a judge, obtain a restraining order which causes a NICS denial while wacko’s like A$$h0le breeze right through.
My question though, is if he was determined by a court of law that he was mentally unstable and “an imminent danger to self and others” why wasn’t he commited against his will?
April 20th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
That’s part of that same “civil libertarian” thread running through this. No question that involuntary civil commitment was abused, and badly, through the middle 20th century. You saw “A Cuckoo’s Nest.” But of course the pendulum swung, MM, as it usually does, too far, and in the ’70′s and ’80′s as result of “deinstitutionalization” we got the homeless crisis. Today the field is a mess, but it’s easier to let someone go and be everyone’s problem than hold onto him and make him the system’s problem, I guess. Check this out.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Ron,
I agree. These are very tricky and deep issues to deal with. On some level you have to accept one of two devils. Forced institution and unfairly restricted access to firearms are at one end, and forced DEinstitution and unfair access to firearms are at the other. As you say, it is entirely possible that we are already straddling a narrow maximum between balancing freedom and safety with our current set of laws, and it really is a matter of simply coming up with better application of said laws either through more thorough failsafes or multiple crosschecking of information between various decision bodies. I am not optimistic that this sort of analysis will be conducted, however. Far more likely is the gun control nuts will face off against the gun access nuts and once again generate more heat than light.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
MM: In this instance, no ‘court of law’ determined that he was nuts. He was admitted to a clinic for temporary evaluation. That evaluation did not find sufficient legal grounds to keep him incarcerated.
There is a legitimate question whether that level of detention for mental issues is or should be reportable for purposes of gun control. The answer, so far as VA went up until last week–and still holds–was/is ‘No, it’s not.’
Looks like we can start booking tickets for the match between ACLU and NRA.
April 20th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
And ATLA, John!
April 20th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
The way lawyers like to work things is, either/or.
Either nothing about a person’s medical record, physical or mental, is available to anyone other than the patient himself and his doctor, or everything is. Either that information is entirely restricted, or lawyers make the argument that nothing will be. Law therefore, or the way it is usually written and construed, is the big modern impediment against the preservation of law and order.
You can’t demand by law the construction of a state and a set of circumstances which makes the execution of an orderly society impossible, and then correct that problem with more of the same.
One day the Law meets Justice, and unless Justice is very well prepared, or very lucky indeed, Law kills her.
The Law is a means to an end, meaning, construct your law badly and your ending is likely to occur in a similar fashion.
It’s an old, old story.
April 21st, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Hmm. It seems to me that “danger to self and others” should definitely be on the background check— with the caveat that if a person can be shown to have moved to a point where he is no longer a danger to self and others, the distinction can be removed. And yes, such a move is entirely possible, even without a constant regimen of drugs. Not always, but it does happen.
April 22nd, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I saw the mental health assessment document, and there were 2 boxes. One was checked “danger to himself” and the other was NOT checked “danger to others”.