Fitzsimon File

The mass shootings at Virginia Tech seemed to have further polarized the debate about guns in the nation and in North Carolina, which isn’t much of a surprise. The gun rights absolutists claim that the mild gun restrictions already in place are part of the problem, preferring to have more people with more guns in more places, turning public places into the Wild West, with disagreements more likely to be settled with gunshots when tempers flare.

One activist actually said on television this past weekend that gun control was responsible for the massacre in Blacksburg because concealed weapons are banned on college campuses.

Gun control advocates have tried to talk about the accessibility of handguns and wonder why weapons like the ones used by Cho Seung-Hui are available at all, much less in pawn shops and at gun shows.  Politicians inclined to support more sensible restrictions on the availability of firearms have been mostly silent, following the advice of their consultants worried about ruffling the NRA’s feathers.

But there could be some common ground in the debate in the wake of the tragedy if the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups would live up to their own rhetoric, which would be a dramatic departure from their recent behavior in North Carolina.

The first place for agreement seems pretty obvious, providing more funding to make sure that federal databases used for background checks include names of people like Cho, whose history of mental illness included a federal judge’s determination that was he was a threat to himself.  

States that don’t report information about people found to have serious mental illness should be required to and the law needs to be tightened up in states like Virginia and North Carolina that already provide the information, but not frequently or accurately enough. Cho should have been in the database.

So should have Alavaro Castillo, who killed his father in Orange County last August before opening fire in his high school parking lot in Hillsborough. New accounts reported that Castillo bought two guns a few months after his stay in a mental hospital after several suicide attempts.

Faced with an involuntary commitment to a hospital, he chose to admit himself, which apparently why his name did not appear on the federal database restricting his purchase of guns.

If we continue to sell guns so freely and refuse to require that they all be registered, there must be away to make sure that people who are dangerous to themselves or others can’t buy them, and still be sensitive to the confidentially of the mentally ill.

Even the NRA has signaled it may be willing to support such a plan, though other gun groups have balked.  And that’s where the NRA’s reasonableness ends.  The constant line from their lobbyists and leadership is that we don’t need any more gun laws, we need to enforce the ones we have.

That is the rhetoric, but it is never the reality, as the 2005 legislative session made clear. North Carolina is ranked among the top five states in the country as the source of illegal guns and more than half the handguns used in crimes in the state are obtained illegally. A study released a few years ago found that the state was the second largest source of handguns used in crimes in New York.

Gun trafficking is illegal. Senator Tony Rand wanted to set up a commission in to figure out how to reduce the illegal trafficking of handguns and how to make it tougher for violent criminals to get their hands on a weapon.

The NRA’s lobbyist in the General Assembly went ballistic. You would have thought that Rand had proposed banning the sale of armor piercing bullets. The NRA man in Raleigh called the study an “insidious effort to build a case against the lawful ownership of guns.”

The study was thwarted of course, as lawmakers were scared to even study how to enforce the laws that the NRA disingenuously claims it wants enforced.   The NRA always says that “if we make it a crime to own a gun, then only criminals will have guns.” Criminals have guns now, plenty of them. And so do people who are suffering from mental illness.

Let’s follow the NRA’s advice this year and renew our efforts to enforce the gun laws we have and stop making them so readily available to people who can cause so much harm and suffering.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.