-By Warner Todd Huston
After a discussion on gun control at an event in Richmond, Virginia, Vice President Joe Biden claimed that better mental health checks could have stopped the shooting on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007.
Biden said that he and those he consulted during the recent gun banning commission he chaired which was completed in mid January had reached a “pretty broad consensus” of policy recommendations that would include “mental capacity” to determine who would be allowed to purchase guns in the future.
“One of the problems that was pointed out here was that there was an adjudication of the young man that committed the crime at Virginia Tech, and yet he was able to go out and purchase two weapons,” the Vice President said.
In 2007 Seung-Hui Cho, a student at the university, killed 32 at the Blacksburg, VA campus. Cho used two handguns that he had purchased legally. The killer, though, had a history of mental health issues that apparently didn’t come up in his background checks when he purchased the weapons.
Improved screening for mental health issues is one of the areas that many on both sides of the gun control issue support. Even the NRA has advocated stronger mental health screening not to mention improving mental health services in general.
Recently the NRA announced support for legislation that would ensure that appropriate records for those judged mentally incompetent or had been voluntarily committed would mental health institutions to be made available for use in firearms transfer background checks.
But the NRA has also warned of overbroad mental health disqualifiers that might unduly affect our military veterans.
One might note that better mental health checks could have prevented us being saddled with Joe Biden, too.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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