ATLANTA — An Atlanta gun range owner and a judge are calling for changes in gun laws that would prevent individuals with a documented history of dangerous mental illness from buying a firearm.
Current federal law requires someone to be "involuntarily committed" to a mental hospital before the individual can be denied a firearms license. The owner of a gun range says that is a high bar to set, and that someone could be a danger to others without being committed to mental hospital.
"We have to allow the background check people to access in some way to mental records so we are not selling firearms to people that should not own them. I don't want to hear that someone bought at gun at Stoddard's Range and Guns and went up and shot up a public place. I wouldn't be able to sleep again if that happened," said owner Michael Halbriech.
Mass shootings in recent years at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and at movie theaters in Colorado and Louisiana that killed more than 40 people and injured dozens more have a common thread. In each case, the killer had a history of mental illness. In two cases, the shooter was able to legally by a firearm.
Carroll County Probate Judge Betty Casa said she detained Houser and ordered him sent for a psychiatric evaluation. She told Channel 2's Tom Regan she could not force him into a mental hospital without a petition from the doctors who assessed his condition. Such a petition for "involuntary commitment" never came. It could have prevented Houser from legally buy the gun used in the shooting.
"The first thing I thought, here's another person who fell through the system. John Houser had a lot of incidents over that period of his life, and somewhere the system really failed through that whole scenario. There should have been something in place to have said, here we have a man with all these re-occurring incidents with mental illness," Casan said.
Georgia is one of a growing number of states that report severely mentally ill individuals to a national gun purchase data base. But unless declared "involuntarily committed" someone with a history of volatile mental illness could still legally buy a firearm.
"I think one of the reasons we see these shooting and in the numbers that we do, is because people who should not own a firearm are able to get them," Halbriech said.
Advocates for the mentally ill say more public funding must be committed for treatment of those who cannot afford private care. They also say that there must be a clear distinction between minor mental illness and those who present a danger to themselves and others, to allow people with less serious afflictions to exercise their fundamental right to own a firearm for self-protection.