Political Notes
As long as they have no criminal record, even mentally ill people who have been involuntarily committed to mental institutions as a danger to themselves or others can go to a gun store on the day of their release, pass the FBI’s background check and walk out with a firearm in Tennessee, officials say.
After the Virginia Tech massacre, Gov. Phil Bredesen asked state Attorney General Bob Cooper to review Tennessee’s procedures for reporting to the federal system, according to officials. But no action has been taken, and neither Bredesen’s aides nor Cooper’s would say whether any change is anticipated.
State lawmakers, for their part, have been trying to expand Tennessee law to let supposedly law-abiding citizens carry handguns into more public places, including onto playgrounds.
There has been no discussion in the legislature of why Tennessee makes no attempt to keep guns out of the hands of the dangerously mentally ill. It’s not clear how many Tennessee lawmakers are even aware that this state’s mental-health records are not reported to the FBI, despite nationwide scrutiny of state gun laws since the Virginia Tech killings.
“Oh my goodness,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Mae Beavers says when told of the loophole in the gun law. “I didn’t know that.”
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“I don’t think it’s known,” says Sen. Doug Jackson, the committee’s vice chair. “It’s not something that I can respond to.” The legislature hopes to end this year’s session in a couple weeks, so “it’s too late to do anything about it now,” Jackson adds.
Doug Woodlee, of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, says he would “hate to hazard a guess” as to how many mentally ill people should have been entered into the FBI database, but concedes the number is almost certainly in the thousands.
If one of them bought a gun in Tennessee and went on a shooting spree, Woodlee says, “I think there’d be a huge outcry in the legislature, absolutely.”
Yet it’s fair to say that it’s not a priority with state government at the moment. In a letter sent to Cooper last March, the FBI urged the reporting of mental-health records, including involuntary civil commitments to state hospitals or court proceedings that determine someone to be “legally incompetent” or “mentally incapacitated.”
Asked by the Scene how Cooper responded, his spokeswoman, Sharon Flair, said the attorney general’s office had never heard of the letter and couldn’t find it.
Federal law bans gun sales to people who have been judged “mentally defective,” including those who have been determined by a court or other legal authority to be a danger to themselves or others. But under the system set up under the 1993 federal Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, it’s up to each state to send mental-health records to the FBI’s database, which gun dealers are supposed to check before making a sale.
Because of lawsuits, the federal government cannot require states to make the reports. Tennessee is one of 22 states claiming to voluntarily provide mental-health records. But while some states have entered thousands of records (Virginia leads with more than 80,000 reports) Tennessee has sent in only criminal judgments in which someone has been found not guilty by reason of insanity. The grand total? Fifteen names.
Those 15 names were collected only after the TBI asked the state court system to start providing them two years ago. “We’d would love to send the FBI everything, all the records,” says Brad Truitt, director of the TBI’s information systems. “If we had the records, we would send them.”
Why don’t the courts report all the records? “As far as I can determine, no one has asked the court system to collect the names of people who are involuntarily committed and provide them to the TBI,” says Sue Allison, spokeswoman for the Administrative Office of the Courts.
Why doesn’t the state Department of Mental Health send in the records of people involuntarily committed to state mental institutions? “We have really strict privacy laws and because of the confidentiality of our patients, we can’t give out any information,” says the department’s spokeswoman, Jill Hudson. “That’s just how the laws are written. We are abiding by the law.”
The public was outraged when Seung Hui Cho was able to buy the handguns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech in April. After police told Cho to stop bothering women on campus in 2005, a judge determined him to be “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness,” but he was released under an order to seek outpatient treatment. At that time, Virginia reported only the records of those who were involuntarily committed to mental institutions, not those who were ordered to undergo outpatient care.
Since the massacre, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has issued an executive order to close that loophole and report both kinds of records. Tennessee doesn’t report either kind.
Even if lawmakers knew about Tennessee’s failure to stop the dangerously mentally ill from buying firearms, it’s possible that not too many would care. Gun control is never brought up in the legislature, which has become almost an adjunct of the National Rifle Association. Each session, lawmakers allow citizens with handgun permits to carry guns in new places. The possibilities this session are playgrounds, civic centers and state parks.
As Rep. Frank Buck, a Democrat from Dowelltown, puts it: “One of the benefits of this is that the thugs this day and time don’t know who’s armed and who’s not.” Maybe that’s a comforting thought for lawmakers, but the way things work in Tennessee, someone like Cho could be one of those packing heat.