Friday, January 11, 2008
Editorial: Not tragic enough to touch gun shows?
Even the Tech shootings may not be enough to close a loophole.
From the RoundTable blog
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Supporting reform of Virginia's mental health system is the easy piece.
After Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 other people and then himself on the Virgnia Tech campus, a bipartisan consensus quickly formed to improve a system that allowed the mentally ill student to go without ordered treatment.
Eliminating Virginia's gun show loophole, though, is a politically dicey proposition.
The same public horror that has energized one reform movement should spur the other. But gun-rights sentiment runs so strong in the state that Gov. Tim Kaine's call to close the loophole shows no sign of eroding a longstanding, bipartisan consensus against such a reasonable action. And that is unfortunate.
Even within the Democratic governor's own party, opponents remain implacable. State Sen. Creigh Deeds, who has his eye on the party's nomination for governor next year, dismisses the notion, saying the "so-called" loophole had nothing to do with the April 16 shootings at Tech.
Well, no. But it could have. And it is easy to imagine the scenario in which it would have. As policymakers go about trying to prevent the circumstances that would allow another mass shooting, they should look at the gun show loophole.
Licensed dealers have to do instant background checks on gun buyers so as not to deliver the weapons into the hands of convicted felons and people adjudged to have dangerous mental illnesses. Many gun shows allow unlicensed vendors, however, and they do not have to run the background checks.
Cho did not buy his weapons at a gun show; he did buy them from licensed dealers. Computer records did not flag him as potentially dangerous because of a state glitch, since corrected, in reporting outpatient mental health orders.
Presumably, a Cho would not be able to buy his guns from a licensed dealer today. He could, though, go to a gun show and buy them from an unlicensed vendor. That would not be the private sale between hunting buddies or relatives that gun enthusiasts seek so avidly to protect, but a transaction between strangers.
That is the loophole another Cho could slip through.
Virginia can change its law so that all gun-show sales would require the instant background check, leaving out other private sales.
Laws will never be able to forestall every danger. They are meant to protect society from the obvious ones, though, such as a legal path a madman might easily take to purchase guns.
