Saturday, April 21, 2007

Is the NRA… Right on This Case?

They say that new gun restrictions aren’t needed – we just need to enforce the ones we already have. As it turns out, Seung-Hui Cho was legally ineligible to purchase firearms:

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.

Only 22 states report the proper information to the federal background check database, and Virginia actually leads the pack. We have no idea how many violent mental cases have guns. Ah, the illusion of security…

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