Schumer Planning Bill to Include Mentally Ill in NICS
States should turn over the names of anyone with a history of psychiatric hospitalization to a federal database that screens applicants seeking to purchase long guns, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said on April 8, according to Newsday.
Schumer said he would introduce legislation in June that would close what he called “a loophole” that allowed Peter Troy, a mentally disturbed man who had been involuntarily committed twice to psychiatric institutions, to buy a rifle and allegedly use it to kill a priest and a parishioner at a Lynbrook, NY, church in March.
While federal law bans the sale of long guns to people found mentally ill by a court or with a history of psychiatric hospitalization, no state transmits such information to the National Instant Check System (NICS), which primarily contains criminal histories.
In New York, the only psychiatric information the state transmits to NICS are court findings of not guilty by reason of mental defect.
“The system is only as good as the records in the system, and tragically, these records aren’t very good,” said Schumer, standing on the steps of Our Lady of Peace Church, the site of the Long Island shootings. “The red flags are never raised and the gun purchase goes right through.”
Schumer was accompanied by: Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY); the Rev. Bill Singleton, the administrator of the church, and Lynbrook Mayor Eugene Scarpato. McCarthy, an ardent gun-control advocate whose husband was killed and son wounded during the Long Island Rail Road train massacre in 1993, said, “Common sense says that somebody who is mentally ill shouldn’t be able to buy a gun. What we’re trying to do is close a loophole.”
McCarthy and Schumer were careful to stress that the new proposal is not gun-control legislation but rather a way to enable existing laws on the screening of gun purchasers to be enforced. Handguns are licensed by local police departments, who do extensive background checks.
The chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association (NRA), James Jay Baker, said he had not seen the legislation but does not oppose the concept behind the bill, according to the Long Island-based Newsday.
“The National Rifle Association believes that all the records required by law on prohibited persons should indeed by made available to the National Instant Check System and to the extent they are not, then the states should be forced to do so,” he said.
William Brooks, the director of the Mental Disability Law Clinic at Touro Law School in Huntington, NY,—which litigates civil rights issues related to mental illness—said states should be very careful in releasing such information.
The proposed Schumer bill would give $250 million nationally each year for five years to cover the cost of compiling and transmitting records on hospitalization in any psychiatric facility or judgments in any court.
It also would expand the information the states turn over on orders of protection. Now, the NICS system would be alerted only if someone had an order of protection against a child, spouse or “intimate partner.” Schumer’s bill would include any active or expired order of protection.