Posted on 04/21/2007 10:17:01 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
Under federal law, 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 purchasing a gun.
A special justice's order in late 2005 that directed Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him, said Richard Bonnie, chairman of the Virginia Supreme Court's Commission on Mental Health Law Reform.
A spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also said that if found mentally defective by a court, Cho should have been denied a gun.
Cho's ability to buy two guns despite his history has cast new attention on the adequacy of background checks that scrutinize potential gun purchasers. And since federal gun laws depend on states for enforcement, the failure of Virginia to flag Cho highlights the often-incomplete information provided by states to federal authorities.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The libs can’t have it both ways. They want controls on who can buy guns (and I have no problem with the insane being denied the right to buy guns as long as the PC hoodlums aren’t permitted to define insanity as being conservative—no problem if liberalism is defined as a mental disorder because libs don’t want to buy guns anyway) but they also want to mainstream the disabled and protect the privacy of mental patients so that no one knows who they are. God forbid that we might stigmatize and traumatize some poor victim; far better that he shoot up a few dozen and traumatize a few thousand.
That the libs are too stoooooooooopid to figure this out is the real story here.
someone posted a link to the gun store owner here last week.
black rifle
http://www.black-rifles.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19283&st=20
From Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff (Did Cho Buy the Guns Legally): The NRA has long supported adding all relevant mental-health records to background check databases. “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 NRA 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.
The blame belongs with the PC crowd and the ACLU.
bookmark
He passed the background check. It's not their fault that the FBI background check was incomplete.
But let's write a headline that makes it look like the fault of the evil gun-sellers.
I would submit that a much larger point is being ignored, or at least glossed over: Why under God's yellow sun was Cho enrolled, and staying in university housing, in the first place?
Virginia Tech knew.
Virginia Tech was aware of his medical history. And yet, they chose to ignore it, and worse, to willfully conceal it from other students, parents of students, faculty, and staff.
What's wrong with this picture? Does "medical privacy" trump life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? These have now been denied Cho's victims, but at least we didn't hurt Cho's feelings.
If I were the parent of one of Cho's suitemates, and found that Cho had been assigned to that dorm suite by the university while the university was aware of his medical history, and that no notification of his history was made to those he lived among, I would be livid.
Virginia Tech knew.
If Virginia Tech's conspiracy of silence was based on their fear of violating a Federal law, then it's time -- painfully obviously, past time, to change the law.
Cho was diagnosed as an autistic since he first came to the USA as a child. HIs parents did not have money to find help for him. He has the symptoms of autism. Autism Symptoms
* Difficulty in communication.
* Inability to start or sustain a conversation.
* Language development is slow or not at all.
* The use of nonsense rhyming.
* Communication by way of gestures instead of words.
* Short attention span.
* Heightened or decreased senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste.
* Either overactive or very passive.
* A beam of hope
Our Government allowed him to slip throught the cracks.
I’m amazed by all the armchair physicians that declare Cho autistic.
The guy was an English major who had no trouble at all writing numerous violent tracks with all kinds of bizarre scenarios.
One class reportedly of 70 had only seven people show up when the Cho read his creative story to the class the preceding week.
Seems like he communicated to that large class quite convincingly.
As I understand it, the background checks were run with the VA State Police, so some idiot obviously didn’t give THEM the info on Cho’s incarceration. Nice going, guys.
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