He was referred to the campus disciplinary system by police after stalking a female student on campus...he was named in an unwanted contact complaint to police by yet another female student...he was reported to police as being suicidal...he was sent to an off campus counseling center and detained at a mental health center for several days...he was reported to an academic department by a professor after receiving disturbing writings...and, even with all these documented incidences, he had no trouble purchasing a Glock 19 handgun and a box of ammunition.
Nope, not a thing wrong with American gun control laws.
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Not a single crime listed though. This animal, and that's a compliment in my eyes, was able to produce three valid IDs, something no illegal immigrant could do (had to toss that one in), and was approved by the State Police to purchase the handguns because he hadn't committed any crimes. Why prohibit firearm purchases to people if they have not committed a crime? This guy was a rogue, a bad one none the less, but the gun was not the problem, it was the person. Look at how many guns are purchased a year legally and how many of them are used to commit crimes. You'll find that many more guns used in crimes, from murders to holdups to weapons violations are not purchased in this manner but through illicit means. Those are the gun laws that need to be toughened.
I completely agree with what you said at the end about needing to toughen gun laws with respect to illegal weapons, but that is an argument that ignores another sphere of the problem.
You said it yourself..."the gun was not the problem, it was the person". It was "the person" that was cleared because he "was able to produce three valid IDs...and was approved by the State Police". These current measures in place to "clear" someone to own an item that has the sole purpose of producing deadly force are utterly insufficient.
Our police, military, and other law enforcement authorities undergo rigorous physical, psychological, and personal background checks to receive approval to equip themselves with deadly force, yet as long as a civilian has no "paper trail" of malfeasance they should have no problem being approved to walk around with a loaded weapon.
I'm not claiming that every legal gun owner is a problem waiting to happen. However, much like free speech, owning a weapon is a right AND a responsibility. Unfortunately, I believe we do not currently have measures in place to keep legal gun ownership in the hands of the responsible. As I said, successful gun control is twofold: curbing the illegal gun market is one part, and implementing legal gun regulations that will more effectively keep guns out of the hands of those with less than responsible intentions is the other part (especially when those individuals have demonstrated a history of psychological problems, which regretfully never ended up on their "permanent record").
The key here is the history of psychological problems. That, in and of itself, should disqualify someone.
Privacy laws prevented such pyschological problems from being released beyond the school. If you want to "weaken" privacy laws, I'm fine with that. As much as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the US constitution grants a right to privacy, I still find that decision dubious on those grounds. Similarly, it'll be easier for members of the public to find out about the history of crimes by sex offenders, both committed in the future and those committed in that past. If that's the route we want to take, disqualifying those who have mental imbalances from owning guns, I could agree, but you have to expand the dissemination of "private" information across the spectrum of activities. It wasn't a gun law that resulted in this massacre, it was the lack of information available about the murderer.
The reason I mentioned Roe is b/c this battle could turn into one of those "Politics makes trange bedfellows stories." Like when the NRA and the ACLU joined forces to combat dissemination of information regarding gun owners. It would be interesting to see how people who say Roe v. Wade guaranteed a person's right to privacy would feel about revealing private details of a person's pscyhological evaluation.
A small loss of privacy may be necessary for individuals that desire to carry the heavy responsibility of possessing that kind of deadly force. We need only think about some current job application processes that require their employees submit to criminal background checks, urine samples for drug tests, psychological evaluations, references (both personal and professional), etc....and that is just to allow someone to push papers around an office. The reason people don't rage against these kinds of privacy-related issues is because they recognize these employers demand a certain level of competence from those they hire. Shouldn't this bar be set at the highest level when appropriating the right to own and operate a deadly weapon?
Then again, practically speaking, you could get around widely exposing the private psychological and personal history of an individual by creating a centralized background check for gun ownership in a more private government-run entity. Rather than John Smith, gun shop owner, sending out and receiving your criminal history, Mr. Smith instead receives your application, sends it to The Department of Gun Ownership Clearance (that name could use some work), the department confidentially evaluates the applicable aspects of the applicant's history (which could included, for ex., documented incidences from previous employers and/or educational institutions attended), and then sends notice back to Mr. Smith without your personal details that states either an approval or rejection of the applicant. Using the job application example again, even though Company XYZ knows that you didn't pass your drug test, that remains between yourself and the company you're trying to get hired by. Your private psychological history could remain private between yourself and the entity tasked to evaluate applicants with a more stringent criteria of analysis for gun ownership.
This argument doesn't fly -- sex offenders currently have to register with a central database, and finding out who has a history of sexual offenses is very easy. I'm not even suggesting we go this far, but I really don't think it's too much to ask that the people doing background checks on potential gun owners actually know significant information about the person's background.
This is interesting...I was watching a legal expert on mental health law discuss the gun control issue, and he said that 1 of the 9 criteria for determining if you pass a background check for gun ownership is indeed mental health history. HOWEVER, the only way you will be denied the gun license is if you have either been involuntarily forced to be committed to a mental health facility or if you have been medically classified as having a serious mental health disorder (in the case of the VT shooter, a judge "requested" that he be admitted to a mental health facility, which he did on his own volition, so no red flags were raised in his background check). Furthermore, the legal expert said that, even if someone does fall into either of these categories, many times the information is so scattered between local/state bureaucracies that it doesn't even show up in the background check.
I'd say the gun license system is broken, but I'm not sure it was ever working effectively.
Mr. Cooper, not all sex offenders info is readily available. In fact in NJ, only Level 3 offenders, those deemed high profile repeat offenders are available. Level 1 and 2 are not included on the state police website and require much more work for the normal citizen to look up since notificastions are not sent to surrounding residents for these people. My point about sex offenders though was you will find liberal groups who believe that their info should not be made available at all (from Level One to Level Three) since it punishes them in addition to their original sentence. I am sorry I wasn't clear with that. If people want to argue about limiting sex offender info in the future, they can't argue to increase disclosure of private pscyhological tests. This is the point I was making.
A datatbase could feasibly work but again that was not the issue in this instance, it was instead the school not being able to disclose to anybody, not a soul beyond the student, that he had a history of mental imbalances due to privacy issues. And since mental imbalances are not crimes, it is hard to believe collecting information of this sort in a government database would uphold a challenge in the courts, even if for the good reason to limit gun ownership of these people.
I don't think a database system would be the appropriate way to handle a situation like this, and I was not trying to allude to such a recommendation in my above comment. It's not necessary to have all those with a documented mental illness be put into a large government database just in the case that a minority of individuals of that database someday desire to obtain a gun license. It does, however, make sense that in each individual case-by-case basis where an individual has the desire to obtain a license for a gun, they submit themselves to a more thorough background check that would actually consider non-criminal, documented information such as those records kept by the higher education institution on the VT shooter.
From a source close to the national gun lobby....
'"We have no problem as long as one is adjudicated mentally incompetent [in denying gun purchases] and we have no problem with mental health records being part of the NICS," the source said. "The problem is not with the gun community. The problem is with the medical community" that has traditionally opposed making such records available on privacy grounds.'
And apparently there are databases about this so it is feasible, but again, the problem is the databases are far from complete due to the above reason.
Interesting...I hope legislators will get the necessary parties together and ultimately make some crucial changes to gun laws.
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