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New Arkansas law seeks to block mentally ill people from buying guns Saturday, Apr 21, 2007 By John Lyon Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - As reports on the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech dominated the news Monday, one Arkansas lawmaker reflected on a bill he sponsored this year - legislation he said could have a far greater affect on public safety than colleagues realized when they passed it. "When I saw the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings on the news, that bill was the first thing that went though my mind, and I thought, 'thank heavens we enacted this during the recent session,'" said Sen. Robert Thompson, D-Paragould. Thompson's bill, now Act 463 of 2007, requires circuit clerks to notify the Arkansas Crime Information Center when a person is the subject of an involuntary commitment order for mental health treatment. ACIC is to pass the information on to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. Federal law prohibits the sale of firearms to a person "who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution," so if a person who was committed in Arkansas tries to buy a gun, the information about his or her committal should come up in a background check and, if the seller obeys the law, the sale won't happen. "Before ACT 463 was enacted, ACIC attempted to gather information regarding involuntary commitments in Arkansas, but it was difficult to do that because there was no mechanism to obtain those orders from circuit clerks," Thompson said. ACIC officials asked Thompson to file the bill. Brad Cazort, administrator of ACIC's Criminal History Division, said the law was needed to allow the agency to comply with a federal law mandating that information about mental health commitments be reported to NICS. "We had no mechanism to report it because it wasn't getting reported to us," Cazort said. Because it was passed with an emergency clause, Act 463 took effect March 26, the day Gov. Mike Beebe signed it into law. Thompson said preventing shooting sprees was not on his mind when he filed the bill. "The scenario that I had in my mind when I filed the bill was somebody who was found to be suicidal and might have tried to go out and purchase a handgun," he said. A former prosecutor, Thompson said he has seen more commitment orders issued for people who were suicidal than for people believed to be homicidal. Rep. David Johnson, D-Little Rock, a member of the House committee that sent the bill to a vote on the House floor, said he also was not thinking about shooting sprees when he voted for the measure, but he feels even better about the legislation now. "Now this has happened, I think you can see some of the wisdom in trying to do it," he said. Asked if ACT 463 could prevent someone like Cho Seung-Hui from committing mass murder in Arkansas, Thompson said he is not sure any law could prevent another incident like the Virginia Tech massacre. Although news reports indicate Cho purchased handguns from gun shops, guns also can be purchased illegally on the street, Thompson noted. Also, Virginia State Police - who are supposed to notify the federal government of commitment orders in that state - have said Cho's mental health history did not prevent him from legally buying firearms, even though a Virginia judge ruled in December 2005 that Cho was an "imminent danger to himself because of mental illness." Though some dispute their interpretation, Virginia State Police contend that because the judge ordered Cho into outpatient treatment instead of committing him to a psychiatric hospital, Cho's treatment did not have to be reported to NICS, The Associated Press has reported. Thompson said he could not recall from his days as a prosecutor any case in which an Arkansas judge ordered a person into outpatient mental health treatment. Rusty Byrne, a public defender in Pulaski County who specializes in mental health cases, said he has seen it happen, but only rarely. "In my experience, it hasn't happened in a couple, three years," he said. "I think it would be really, really rare for a judge to do that," said Didi Sallings, executive director of the Arkansas Public Defender Commission. In Arkansas, if a judge determines that a person is a danger to himself or herself or others, the judge generally will order an involuntary commitment to a mental hospital, Sallings said. After an evaluation period, the hospital could recommend outpatient treatment. But even if some mentally disturbed people could fall through the cracks in Arkansas, as Cho apparently did in Virginia, passage of Act 463 puts the state in a much better position than it was in without the law, Thompson said. Before the state had a mechanism for reporting commitment orders, "somebody could be involuntarily committed, get out of the state hospital the next day and go buy a 9 mm (gun) like Cho did," he said. |
