Background checks should be required on most gun purchases. Anybody who is going to sell firearms, even in private transactions such as at gun shows, has an obligation to try to ensure that the weapons are not being purchased by criminals or the mentally deranged.
But even if universal background checks were the law tomorrow, they would not be a sufficient safeguard against guns legally getting into the wrong hands, as the mass shooting last week at the Navy Yard in Washington demonstrates.
The alleged shooter, Aaron Alexis, reportedly passed a required federal background check before he purchased the shotgun and ammunition used in the killings two days later.
His troubled past, it’s clear in hindsight, should have disqualified him from being able to make that purchase at a Virginia gun shop. Alexis had had several run-ins with the law, including a couple involving gunfire. He had been pushed out of the Navy Reserve for misconduct. Just a month before purchasing the weapon, Alexis told police in Rhode Island that he had changed hotels twice because he heard voices talking to him through the walls, and now they were talking to him through the ceiling. He was having trouble sleeping because, he said, his tormentors were using a microwave machine to send vibrations through the ceiling and into his body. He was subsequently seen by mental health professionals at two veterans’ hospitals.
How can an apparently paranoid schizophrenic with a history of gun-related arrests not be flagged on a gun background check?
It’s because the information that goes into the background checks is way too limited. None of Alexis’ misbehavior or mental issues, as disturbing as they appeared, were disqualifiers for buying or owning guns under current law.
All three of his arrests were misdemeanors, none involved domestic violence, and none ended up in court. In order for a criminal record to be a disqualifier for gun ownership, the person has to be either indicted or convicted of a felony or convicted on a domestic violence charge.
For the mentally ill to be disqualified, they have to have been declared mentally defective by the courts or have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution. None of that was true for Alexis.
Lastly, his premature departure from the Navy Reserve would not have mattered because he was honorably discharged. A person has to be dishonorably discharged to lose his gun rights, and dishonorable discharges are almost exclusively reserved for service members who have committed felony-type offenses. Even less-severe general discharges are rare, Richard Macy tells me, because of all the time and effort it takes to make a case for one.
Macy, a retired Air Force colonel who lives in Carroll County, says the aspect of the Alexis case that troubles him most is why the Navy base security in Newport, R.I., didn’t pull the civilian contractor’s security clearance after being alerted to Alexis’ bizarre hotel behavior by police there.
Macy, a former security officer during his time in the military, says “that would have been a major red flag to me that this guy’s clearance had to be at least suspended pending a review of his mental state.”
Macy and I don’t always see eye-to-eye on gun control, but he makes a good point: Background checks are only as good as the database against which they are run.
Macy says the National Rifle Association, even though it remains opposed to universal background checks, is all for strengthening the system to include more sharing of information by mental-health professionals.
The mental-health community, though, has been resistant, afraid that it would compromise their patients’ privacy, further stigmatize the mentally ill and even cause them to avoid treatment so as to not lose their gun rights.
That sensitivity should take a back seat when it comes to guns. A person with severe depression is likely to turn a gun on himself. A person with severe paranoia is likely to turn it on others. Alexis is only the latest example of an obviously deranged mass shooter who was able to legally purchase firearms. That’s how most of these mass killers have gotten their weapons.
We may not be able to stop them completely, but we can deter them. Broadening the gun-ownership disqualifiers for mental illness is a way to do it.
