Monday, April 23, 2007
Editorial: Bring sanity to Virginia's gun laws
33 deaths at Virginia Tech at the hands of a suicidal gunman demand a sober reassessment of state controls.
From the RoundTable blog
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Policymakers must approach any change in gun regulations thoughtfully and delicately in Virginia, where the constitutional right to bear arms is imprinted on the collective DNA.
Still, Seung-Hui Cho's shooting spree last week at Virginia Tech cut a clear, blood-soaked path through legal loopholes the state urgently needs to close.
Slightly less than a year and a half before the Tech student's strange behavior erupted into mass murder and suicide, Tech police took a depressed and potentially suicidal Cho to a mental health facility, where he was held overnight. The next day, a special justice found that Cho "presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness" and ordered the troubled young man to get outpatient treatment.
Had the hearing officer ordered Cho's involuntary commitment, that information would have gone into a state police database and Cho would not have been able to go to licensed dealers and legally obtain the guns he used in the Tech shootings.
Whether that reporting requirement is meant to apply to people with Cho's mental health history is a point of contention, but state police maintain it is not. The rule should be clarified to include anyone deemed an imminent danger to himself or others, whether he is institutionalized or needs community-based treatment.
Federal law requires that people with mental illnesses be treated in the least restrictive environment possible. We applaud that standard, but do not think it should let people identified as potentially dangerous slip through a crack in Virginia's porous gun laws.
Another barrier to Cho's purchases should have been a federal prohibition against the sale of guns to anyone found by a court or "other lawful authority" to be a danger to himself or others "as a result of marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness."
That language seems plain. But the Virginia State Police, which sends such data on to the federal government, did not get a report on Cho -- nor do state police officials think the agency should have.
Tightening that requirement still might not have guaranteed that Cho's name would have made it into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System for gun purchases. The Associated Press reports that, for lack of money, states and localities fail to send millions of criminal and mental health records to the federal database. The U.S. Supreme Court tossed out a federal mandate to do so.
If Cho had failed to clear either a state or federal background check, of course, he still could have bought his guns legally. Just this January, a state Senate committee killed a bill that would have closed the infamous gun show loophole, which allows small, unlicensed dealers to sell firearms at gun shows without having to do background checks, as licensed dealers must.
In the wake of the Tech massacre, even gun-rights advocates should press Virginia's lawmakers to tighten up. As Harry Wilson, a Roanoke College professor well-versed in the politics of gun control, noted last week: "You can't argue in favor of arming maniacs."
