Why did Cho's psychiatric history not stop him buying a gun?

NEW YORK: One of the most lingering questions raised by this week's US university shooting is how someone with a documented history of psychiatric problems and stalking was able to buy two handguns.   

Deranged killer Cho Seung-Hui bought his two guns after passing an instant background check that failed to raise any red flags about his history of mental illness, anti-social behavior and run-ins with police and his university.   

While the background check should signal anyone who has been declared mentally incompetent or been committed to a mental institution, despite being ordered by a court to seek psychiatric treatment in 2005 and being declared an immediate danger to himself, Cho was not on the system.   

Ladd Everitt, a gun control advocate from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said the failure to stop Cho partly lay in a system that only required a basic check against a computer database.   

"Even a cursory screening process would have caught Cho when he went to purchase his guns. If there was any contact, even a single phone call to local law enforcement when he went to buy his guns, he would have been stopped."   

"There was so much in this guy's history at this point," he said.

"There was a long running record indicating that this kid was going off the rails."   

States set their own gun laws, meaning that while some allow sales that can be completed in minutes, people in New York or New Jersey need to apply for a permit that requires character references and deeper background checks.   

"It's a process that we can say with 100 percent confidence would have screened out an individual like Cho, where the warning signs were literally jumping off the page," Everitt said.   

"It's not just one or two individuals that knew about Cho. We know that students and teachers and law enforcement and Virginia district court all realized that this kid had serious problems," he said.   

"The warning signs were so glaring. Even a cursory screening would have stopped him."   

Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech University has inevitably sparked calls from certain quarters for increased gun control, just as the Columbine High School shooting did eight years ago on Friday.   

Specific measures being floated could involve tighter rules on students or those under 25 from buying guns and improving background checks or renewing a federal ban on assault weapons that lapsed in 2004.   

Everitt said one major problem was that perhaps even fewer than 10 states were submitting mental health data to federal authorities to be used in background checks, meaning too many people were slipping through.   

"They're catching a lot of people, but they're also allowing a lot of people to fall through the cracks."   

One obstacle to change is the apparent lack of political will to address the issue. Besides a general outpouring of sympathy since Monday's shooting, few major politicians have openly called for tighter gun control.   

While the Republican party is traditionally associated with pro-gun groups, the Democrats also receive substantial donations from gun lobby.   

The likelihood of any major change looks slight since Democrats have been reluctant to risk alienating floating voters, especially in conservative areas where they have recently notched up gains, by pushing gun control legislation.   

Everitt said he was not optimistic that legislation would be passed in the near future at a federal level to clamp down on gun violence, but that state measures were more likely.   

0"I think the first thing this country needs to do is have a serious debate about gun policy," he said, accusing the pro-gun lobby of stymying the debate and fostering a "with us or against us" mentality.   

"We just need to start a debate and get past that black and white type thinking," he said.   

The issue of tightening background checks and clamping down on instant sales of guns was one of the most likely issues to be dealt with first, along with debating a renewed ban on assault weapons, he said.   

The Washington Post said in an opinion piece that the whole gun debate was mired in the entrenched positions of two opposing sides and asked: "Why do we have the same futile argument every time there is a mass killing?" it asked.   

"This is a stupid argument, driven by the stupid politics of gun control."