Kaine May Seek More Data for Gun Sales

Order Would Address Buyers' Mental Health

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday that he is considering an executive order to make sure that gun sellers have more information about the mental health of potential buyers, a move that would have kept Seung Hui Cho from purchasing the handguns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech last week.

A court had found Cho to be dangerously mentally ill, but that information was not available in the computer systems used by the outlets that sold Cho the guns. Kaine's proposal would ensure that such mental health information be in the database.

"I think there's a way to tighten this and to get more data onto the system," Kaine (D) said. If that data had been available at the gun stores, Cho, who killed himself after the rampage April 16, would have been barred by federal law from buying the weapons.

Even lawmakers who have traditionally been reluctant to restrict gun ownership said that providing additional information would help keep guns out of the hands of the dangerously mentally ill.

"The murderer down at Virginia Tech never should have been able to purchase a gun," said Del. Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg). "Someone who's declared a threat to themselves or others should not be able to purchase a firearm."

Virginia is relatively aggressive in reporting mental health records to the federal system that gun sellers use for background checks of potential buyers. Virginia was the first state to develop a system to provide background checks for firearms purchases -- four years before the 1993 federal Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act set up the national system.

But the Brady system relies on states to send criminal and mental health records to the FBI database. As a result of lawsuits, the federal government cannot mandate that states do so. In 2003, Virginia began voluntarily reporting mental health records to the FBI's national instant background check system. Only 22 states provide such records. Since then, Virginia has reported more than 80,000 mental health records to the FBI, more than any other state.

But most of those records are generated by involuntary civil commitments to state hospitals, criminal judgments in which a person has been found not guilty by reason of insanity, or court proceedings that have determined a person "legally incompetent" or "mentally incapacitated" -- that is, unable to function in society.

In December 2005, Cho was briefly detained in a mental facility after police had told him to stop bothering women on campus. The next day, a special judge determined that Cho presented "an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness." He was released under an order to seek outpatient treatment.

But because Cho was not involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, his name was not sent to Virginia State Police and put into the computerized National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Thus, when Cho presented his Virginia driver's license, green card and checkbook with matching address to a Blacksburg pawnshop owner in February and a Roanoke firearms dealer in March, his background check came up clean. In both instances, the computer screen read "PROCEED" with the sale.

Federal law, however, bars gun sales to people who have been judged "mentally defective," which includes someone who has been determined by a court, board, commission or other legal authority to be a danger to himself or others as a result of mental illness, as Cho was in 2005.