Posted on 04/21/2007 12:56:05 AM PDT by DeerfieldObserver
Under federal law, the Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment, a state official and several legal experts said Friday.
Federal law prohibits anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” as well as those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, from buying a gun.
The special justice’s order in late 2005 that directed Mr. Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him, said Richard J. Bonnie, chairman of the Supreme Court of Virginia’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform.
A spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also said that if Mr. Cho had been found mentally defective by a court, he should have been denied the right to purchase a gun.
The federal law defines adjudication as a mental defective to include “determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority” that as a result of mental illness, the person is a “danger to himself or others.”
Mr. Cho’s ability to buy two guns despite his history has brought new attention to the adequacy of background checks that scrutinize potential gun buyers. And since federal gun laws depend on states for enforcement, the failure of Virginia to flag Mr. Cho highlights the often incomplete information provided by states to federal authorities.
Currently, only 22 states submit any mental health records to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The gun store did nothing wrong. The fault lies with the State of Virginia. The Virginia Legislature also disarmed all campuses in 2006, thus completing their circle of incompetence in this matter.
"Legally" - NO. You understand incorrectly.
Illegally - Yes. He can lie his ass off to a 'private party' like he did at the Gun Store.
In addition, here in IL if I sell one of the guns in my collection to a private party he has to have an IL FOID Card. Now if he just got released from a loony bin last week I'd have no way of knowing. His FOID Card would still be 'valid' (in appearance).
And what's with the NRA slam??
ok.
No they don't. Not by Federal Law.
That's the whole brouhaha over the so-called 'gun show loophole'.
Which in reality isn't about gun shows anyway, it's about private sales.
It seems to me that anyone buying a gun should be subject to background checks. If you buy it from a private party, the same precautions should apply.
Who put this loophole in the law?
It may sound like a matter of semantics, but it's not. From a legal standpoint, one of the defining features of a commonwealth is that the sovereign government cannot be held liable in civil court -- or has severe limits on liability in civil court.
Someone posted a message on a thread earlier this week indicating that Virginia's liability would be limited to $150,000 per person. I don't know if this is correct, but it sounds reasonable.
L
Technically there is little difference between a gifting, loaning or selling a firearm, they are all transfers. The Brady bunch would love a law requiring a background check on all transfers (Step 1). In order for this to be effective all firearms would have to registered (Step 2) which would then pave the way to confiscation on a national level(Step 3). That is why the NRA has always fought against laws, particularly on a national level, that would mandate such a scheme.
As I said in more detail on another thread, we need to make a clear distinction for both legal and medical purposes, between mental illnesses that involve disconnection from reality and/or sociopathic attitude and those that do not. There’s no need to be locking people up for depression, anxiety, attention deficit/hyperactivity, etc., as things like that pose no danger to anyone other than the sufferer (though severe depression is incompatible with having responsibility for a child), and these non-dangerous categories of mental illness account for the vast majority of “mentally ill” in our country. However, the psychotic/schizophrenic/paranoid/sociopathic categories of mental illness are a serious danger to others and warrant lock-up. It’s not really hard to distinguish between the two categories. Regardless of how many conditions from the non-dangerous categories someone may have, the presence of one of the dangerous categories should trigger an adjudication of mental incompetence.
Frankly this is not something that belongs in the area of state law. It involves removal of rights generally accorded to citizens by the Constitution of the United States, and has implications for many types of interstate transactions, including movement of the individual across state lines, whether money transferred to the benefit of the individual (government check, inheritance, or anything else) should go under the control of the individual or a legal guardian, and much more.
My family is going to have to deal with this in preparation for my elderly father’s death (doesn’t appear to be imminent, but he’s 85). I was trying to impress on my father a few days ago the importance of getting a mental incompetence adjudication for my half-sister, who has advanced schizophrenia and has always refused treatment. Although he managed a few years ago to get the state of Texas, where she has long resided in a makeshift tent, to subject her to an involuntary psych exam, there was 1) no follow-through to get a formal adjudication of her mental incompetence and appoint a legal guardian, and 2) the Texas court said that while the court-appointed psychiatrist had given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, privacy laws preventing it from passing this information on to the federal government (meaning no way to qualify her for SSD payments) or other state governments. No one else in the family lives in Texas. When my father dies, she’s entitled by her parents’ divorce decree to 25% of his estate, and that portion will be in 6 figures. Dad is a resident of Virginia, and legally, at this point, if some sleazebag lawyer manages to get her to tell a Virginia court that he (the sleazebag) represents her, and then the sleazebag tells the court she wants her funds transferred to X account in Texas or any other state, the Virginia court has no legal basis to deny that request, and banks and brokerages holding the actual funds in various states have no legal basis to decline to send the funds to wherever the Virginia court tells them to. We simply can’t have people being simultaneously classified as mentally competent in some states and incompetent in others.
Do you think those who sold to the cretin are still happy with their commission?
Price is a consideration when I sell a piece but have sold for less to insure a ‘good home’.
Higher education might look at this from the perspective that there are too many people on campus that do not belong there. Because college capacity was overbuilt after WWII faculties and administrators are always looking for "warm bodies" to perpetuate their programs and save their jobs. Hardnosed reviews of the core mission of universities would eliminate both the Ward Churchills and the Chos, and that would be good for higher ed.
He no longer lived with his family, and it’s apparent that they had no idea of the severity of his condition, quite likely because it had progressed since the time he moved away to go to college. He probably went home for school breaks, but when he just didn’t talk (which had been his pattern since early childhood), and the parents had no access to the disturbing writings he’d been turning in at school, or to the record of complaints against him at school, or to the info that he’d been declared mentally incompetent by a court at one point, what could they really do. He had no friends, and didn’t speak to his “neighbors” in his dorm (or even to his roommate), or to his parents’ neighbors, and none of these people (including his parents, once he’d turned 18) had any authority to do anything for him without his agreement, which obviously wasn’t forthcoming. Courts are the only institutions in our country that have legal authority to make an adult do something s/he doesn’t want to do, and that’s how it should be. Cho’s family appears to have been the sort of people who would act in his best interests to the best of their knowledge and ability, but that’s hardly true of all families, and that’s why a court needs to make the decision. In many cases, a court appoints a family member as legal guardian, if a suitable and willing family member is available.
All this 20/20 hindsight exaggerates so-called clues that people around him did not take that seriously at the time. In particular, note the outcome of the court ordered evaluation when he was suicidal. He was out in one day. Like it or not, he did not present as the clear danger that he became.
Liberalism at work!
Lurker:
So if I've got it right there's really only a small number of people responsible for the 'gun free' (guess not) thing and that's the VT President and his lackeys on the Board. They should all be sued until they have nothing left.
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-- There are a LOT of people in the USA that are responsible for 'gun free zones'.
Some of them right here on FR, -- those who advocate that local and state officials can ignore the 2nd, on the silly grounds that it is not our Law of the Land.
I agree completely. The focus always seems to be about “how did he get the gun?”
I grew up with kids that ALL had access to firearms. They were much easier to get then than they are now
In high school many kids brought their shotguns to school with them and kept them in the trunks of their cars in preparation for hunting after school.
We had severe racial violence during the year after the school was integrated, but NO ONE ever considered using a gun.
In my opinion, there is something much more sinister going on, and this is what needs to be addressed.
It's far worse than that. The basic approach of a "mental defect" defense in a criminal court is for the defense attorney to make the case that a defendant is not mentally competent to be responsible for the crime in question. Six months later, the same attorney will try to make the case that the same defendant is perfectly healthy and should no longer be confined.
Wouldn’t it be easier for your father to simply draw up a will in which your sister’s 25% of the estate is paid to her over time from a trust of some sort?
Being involuntarily committed or being adjudicated as "mentally ill" are the disqualifying attributes with regard to ownership of firearms.
If what I have read about Cho is correct, neither of these apply to him.
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