As mass killings rise, how can sheriffs keep guns from mentally unstable?

WASHINGTON – Before issuing thousands of permits each year for North Carolinians to buy handguns, sheriffs in some counties across that state have gone through an oft-futile exercise.

Relying on statutory language allowing them to ensure each gun owner is of “good moral character,” they have submitted applicants’ names to large health care facilities seeking to learn whether anyone was suicidal or otherwise mentally unfit to own a pistol.

Under the 1968 federal Gun Control Act, the sheriffs’ offices are entitled to know whether an applicant is disqualified from owning a firearm because he or she has been found by a court to be mentally ill, unable to manage his own affairs or a danger to himself and others.

But except for those seeking concealed carry permits, who have long been required to release their mental health information, sheriffs say the door has almost always slammed shut on disclosure of any further information.

For years, most requests for mental health information have been caught in a legal stalemate between law enforcement needs and health facilities’ concerns about patients’ privacy – a conflict that’s a key part of the national debate over how to stem a seemingly endless spate of mass killings.

Recurring scenarios of heavily armed men – some possibly psychotic, firing randomly at defenseless children in Newtown, Conn.; nursing home patients in Carthage, N.C.; or parishioners in a Charleston, S.C., church – have left everyone from President Barack Obama to local cops grasping for answers. A number of the shooters in scores of mass killings had mental health problems, but still were able to legally buy guns.

Addressing the obstacles to keeping firearms away from mentally troubled people has emerged as an area of potential common ground among some stakeholders in the hard-bitten debate over gun control.

However, any attempt at compromises is sure to be complicated by thorny legal, ethical and political questions over how to balance mental health patients’ privacy, Americans’ Second Amendment rights to bear arms and the need to keep guns away from those posing a clear danger.

“We must continue to protect privacy,” said Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., who wants to draft bipartisan legislation to improve the flow of information. “But there should also be enough room for law enforcement to be alerted to specific concerns about those with mental illness and have the opportunity to investigate and determine if further action is necessary.”

The National Rifle Association, the nation’s leading gun rights group, could be one obstacle. It takes the position that there must be “a formal process before stripping a person of a constitutional right” to own a gun, spokeswoman Amy Hunter said in a statement.

“We are troubled by any sort of broad ‘suitable persons’ standard that gives a local official the discretion to determine ad hoc whether a citizen can exercise a constitutional right,” she said.

Those kinds of concerns led the North Carolina state House of Representatives last year to consider whether to repeal the law providing for sheriffs to conduct a background check on pistol purchase applicants, rather than leaving it to gun dealers to check the FBI’s nationwide databases. The House left the law largely intact, but limited sheriffs to looking at records over the past five years.

Health care facilities also are pushing back.

Campbell Tucker, the health privacy officer for Novant Health Inc., a regional health care network based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said its mental health patients undergo treatment “with the confidence their privacy is protected.”

He said the medical group also “does not want to do anything to hinder individuals seeking appropriate treatment” for fear their confidentiality might be breached.

“Novant Health will comply with the laws and regulations regarding the confidentiality of patient information as leaders work to solve this sensitive and complicated issue,” he said in a statement.

Mental health experts stress that mentally ill Americans account for only about 4 percent of violent crimes.

Data over the past quarter century has increasingly raised red flags suggesting too many unstable people have easily obtained guns – and not just to harm others. For example:

Of more than 30,000 annual gun deaths, over 20,000 are suicides.

A 2013 FBI study found that, in a set of 160 active shooter events in which lone perpetrators took 486 lives since 2000, 64 ended with the assailant killing himself.

In a number of the worst mass slayings, including the 2007 murders of 32 people at Virginia Tech University and the 2012 shooting deaths of 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, there were unheeded warning signs that the gunmen were mentally disturbed.

On Jan. 6, Obama tried for the second time in his presidency to impose measures to help keep guns from falling into the wrong hands with a set of executive actions that drew the ire of congressional Republicans.

He proposed to spend another $500 million on mental health care, and directed the Department of Health and Human Services to issue a rule making it clear that mental health facilities can report the names of patients who should be prohibited from buying a gun. He also called on the Social Security Administration to share with the FBI, for the first time, the names of people who’ve been judged incompetent to handle their retirement accounts.

Without the Social Security change, prohibited individuals are “able to pass a background check and purchase a gun illegally,” said Jonas Oransky, counsel for Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Whenever records of prohibited people are not in the background check system, public safety is at risk, and it is nearly impossible to enforce the law.”

In some ways, law enforcement officials deciding who gets to buy a gun are groping in the dark. It’s not possible to track the changing mental states of millions of applicants to buy guns.

As Union County, N.C. Sheriff Eddie Cathey put it: “A background check is just a background check. It’s not a mental health evaluation.”