This gets real problematic for those who would prohibit guns to the mentally ill.
Most people who are treated for mentally illness do not have the kind of mental illness that would prohibit gun ownership under current laws. Furthermore, most people who do have "that kind of mental illness" (don't ask me, I'm not a lawyer) are not reported to anyone, for any reason. Thirdly, mental hospitals are fast disappearing altogether, so that confining people who are mentally ill and dangerous is limited to only those who have gotten themselves arrested and are currently incarcerated. Those people who are dangerous and mentally ill and not incarcerated have the choice of seeing their doctors and taking their medicine, or not. There is no law that requires MH professionals to report someone who is deemed potentially dangerous. There is a law (Tarsoff vs California, ?'72) concerning a "duty to warn" that prohibits MH professionals from reporting such patients unless that patient has made a specific threat of harm to a specific, named, individual.
All of this mess will be opened further as lawmakers work to "solve" the public shootings problem.
Not true. IIRC, a provision of NCLB (Illinois Children’s Mental Health Act of 2003) allows schools to asses the mental health of studenrs...and that of course would carry over into adulthood. IIRC, a BUSH mental health intiative was to get shrinks to asses kids into preschool (Head Start)...
http://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov/
http://www.edaction.org/2004/080204.htm
I read on one of my threads that the NIU shooter was taking Prozac. The story from Chicago said he stopped taking his meds for anxiety about two weeks before he killed. Cho at VA Tech had a clean toxicology report. Maybe both of these killers were experiencing SSRI discontinuation syndrome?