Mental health and gun violence

The last category of President Obama’s action plan on gun control is mental health and making it more available to the public.  In his plan, he states,

                “Today, less than half of children and adults with diagnosable mental health

problems receive the treatment they need. While the vast majority of Americans with a mental

illness are not violent, several recent mass shootings have highlighted how some cases of mental

illness can develop into crisis situations if individuals do not receive proper treatment.”

A perfect example of this would be the Virginia Tech Massacre of 2007.  Seung-Hui Cho was a senior student at Virginia Tech when he killed 32 people (33 including himself), injured 17, and 6 others were injured from jumping from windows to escape.  Just a few years before that in December of 2005, Cho was found "mentally ill and in need of hospitalization" by New River Valley Community Services Board.  Based on this mental health examination and because Cho was suspected of being "an imminent danger to himself or others", he was detained temporarily at Carillion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, Virginia, pending a commitment hearing before the Montgomery County, Virginia district court.  He used a Glock 19 and a Walther .22 caliber pistol; the shocking part of it all? 

 

He passed background checks for both guns.

               

                “Virginia state law on mental health disqualifications to firearms purchases, however, is worded slightly differently from the federal statute. So the form that Virginia courts use to notify state police about a mental health disqualification addresses only the state criteria, which list two potential categories that would warrant notification to the state police: someone who was "involuntarily committed" or ruled mentally "incapacitated.”(Wikipedia)  This means that since he went to the mental health center “voluntarily”, he was never disqualified from purchasing a gun under the Brady Act.  It was also argued that while in professional care (voluntary or not) health professionals had previously stated Cho was a direct threat to himself and others, and he had been "adjudicated as a mental defective" and not reporting this to the state was in non-compliance with federal law.  Via federal law, this would have disqualified him from ever purchasing a gun. 

                If we make mental health more available to the public, and our mental health professionals actually follow through with their legal obligations to not only state laws but federal laws too, less people will fall through the cracks of our laws put in place to keep America safe.  As of right now, it is not required for states to report mental health records to the NICS, and the NICS only have about 20% of the mental health information they should.  In 1991, 2.1 million people had been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution; in that year, the NICS had record of only 402,000 people disqualified from gun ownership due to mental health issues.  This is an alarming number, and in just one case slipping through the cracks, 33 people died.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/10/politics/background-checks-mass-shootings

http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/html/local/mental-health.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seung-Hui_Cho#Court-ordered_psychiatric_assessment