Word: guns
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...revelation that Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui's brief stay in a Virginia psychiatric facility did not prevent him from legally buying handguns has prompted outrage from gun control advocates. But at a time when any real gun control legislation is close to a political impossibility, even some Second Amendment activists agree that the criteria used to deem someone mentally unfit to purchase a firearm may need to be reformed...
...first significant federal gun control law, passed back in 1968 in reaction to the Kennedy assassination five years earlier, prohibited anyone involuntarily committed to a mental institution from buying firearms. Forty years later, that still remains the standard for most federal and state gun buying restrictions. The problem is that involuntary commitment was the norm four decades ago; family members, doctors and law enforcement could easily commit troubled souls to psychiatric hospitals with scant paperwork and little concern for individual or privacy rights. When Cho agreed to a voluntary committal to a psychiatric facility in 2005, he was benefiting from...
...Common Ground on Gun Control? Witness: The Dormitory Murders How Much of Cho to Show? Viewpoint: Va. Tech's President Should Resign Echoes of Columbine Inside a Mass Murderer's Mind What Can Schools Do? The Gun Lobby's Counterattack Where Cho Bought His Deadly Weapon Behind the Killings, a Troubled Mind South Korea's Collective Guilt Inside Cho Seung Hui's Dorm When a School Learns to Mourn How to Make Campuses Safer Fatal Shootings at Colleges and Schools Photos
...least one prominent gun rights advocate admits that the 1968 gun-buying mental health standard might give people like Cho too much benefit of the doubt. Stephen P. Halbrook, a constitutional lawyer who recently was involved in the appeals court victory for gun rights advocates challenging the Washington, D.C., handgun prohibition law, thinks the time may have come for a reconsideration of those 1968 guidelines. "I'm not going to advocate new restrictions, with the exception that it should be at least a consideration that people with disabilities who have been adjudicated to be mentally ill and a danger...
...Presidential campaign gets off to a fast, early start, the notion of tweaking the mental health laws rather than pushing gun control legislation in vain has its obvious appeal, particularly among centrist Democrats who are hesitant to alienate the gun lobby in key battleground states. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre none other than former President Bill Clinton, who in the past has blamed some national Democratic party losses on the gun control debate, has added his voice to a chorus of others this week calling for a different approach. When Larry King asked Clinton Thursday about gun...