Kaine wants gun show sales to require background checks

The Virginian-Pilot ^ | November 28, 2007 | WARREN FISKE

[neverdem]

RICHMOND

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine called Tuesday for new restrictions on firearm sales at gun shows but stopped short of declaring passage of the legislation as a high priority for the 2008 General Assembly session.

Under current law, background checks on buyers are not required by unlicensed dealers who privately sell and trade firearms at the shows.

Kaine endorsed closing the loophole, saying it provides an opening for felons and mentally ill people to buy weapons they are otherwise forbidden to purchase.

"You either want felons to have guns or you don't,"

Kaine said on a morning radio show. "You want people who are mentally adjudicated to be dangerous to have guns or you don't. If you don't want them to, then you ought to close that gun show loophole."

In the wake of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech, the General Assembly this winter is expected to vigorously debate gun control. Seung-Hui Cho, an emotionally troubled Tech

senior, fatally shot 32 students and professors before killing himself.

In August, an eight-member task force appointed by Kaine to investigate the killings recommended in its final report that the gun show loophole be closed.

Former state police Superintendent Gerald Massengill, whom Kaine appointed to head the task force, has been calling for the end of the loophole in a series of speeches and interviews. Massengill has said the only exemption to background checks should be for gun sales and trades among family members.

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Kaine criticized the gun show exemption when he ran for governor in 2005 and in the days after the Tech shooting. He repeated his concern Tuesday in response to a listener's question during the governor's monthly call-in show on WTOP radio in Washington.

Later in the day, Gordon Hickey, Kaine's press secretary, said the governor has not decided whether he will spend political capital to expand background checks.

"Just because he said it doesn't make it the highest priority," Hickey said. "He hasn't gotten anywhere near making that kind of decision yet."

The legislation will travel an uphill road in the General

Assembly. Bills to close the gun show loophole have been defeated three years in a row in the state Senate. The House of Delegates, which has not taken up the measure recently, strongly backs gun rights.

Gun advocates note that Cho legally purchased his guns, even though he was held overnight in a mental hospital in 2005 and judged an "imminent danger" to himself. Because his hospitalization was brief, it was not reported to law enforcement officials and not detected on background checks when Cho bought firearms.

After the Tech shootings, Kaine issued more rigorous guidelines for reporting dangerous mental health problems to law enforcement officials.

House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said if the General Assembly "wants to make sure there's no repeat of Cho," it should focus on mental health reform, not gun control. "That's a much better long-term solution than taking away rights from law-abiding citizens," he said.

Warren Fiske, (804) 697-1565, warren.fiske@pilotonline.com

[Erik Latranyi]

NICS can’t prove you are not whom you tell it you are:

...I can't find it right now, but I believe Virginia Driver Licenses are the most duplicated of all the 50 states because the state hands them out like candy to anyone.

[dashing doofus]

Well, I’m going literally by the questionaire in ATF form 4473, which inquires about being adjudicated mentally defective. Since a court did rule so, and he was to have received outpatient treatment, I believe question 12f should have precluded his purchase of a firearm. Problem is, the state of Virginia did not get that info into the NICS database. I see news today that many states are now providing this info.

I see this as another case of failing to enforce laws which are already on the books. But, of course, pols are suggesting that new laws are needed.

http://www.atf.gov/forms/4473/

[dfwgator]

If a citizen can’t be trusted with a firearm, they shouldn’t be loose.

BINGO!