List soars of those called too unstable to buy a gun

Since the Virginia Tech shootings last spring, the FBI has more than doubled the number of people nationwide who are prohibited from buying guns because of mental health problems, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Justice officials said the FBI’s Mental Defective File has ballooned from 175,000 names in June to nearly 400,000, primarily additions from California. The names are listed in a subset of a database that gun dealers are supposed to check before completing their sales.

The surge in names underscores the vastness of the gap in FBI records that allowed Seung-hui Cho to purchase the handguns he used in April to kill 32 people and himself at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg.

A Virginia court found Cho to be dangerously mentally ill in 2005 and ordered him to receive outpatient treatment. But because Cho was not ordered into hospital treatment, the court’s order was never provided to the FBI and incorporated in its database, which two gun dealers checked before selling Cho the 9-millimeter Glock 19 and Walther .22-caliber pistol used in the shootings.

Federal law has prohibited gun sales to people judged to be “mentally defective” for nearly four decades, but enforcementhas been haphazard.

A 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling barred the federal government from forcing states to provide the data, and 18 states -- including Delaware and West Virginia -- provide no mental health-related information to the FBI.

Both Virginia and Maryland provide such data.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a group favoring tighter firearms controls, said the most optimistic estimates suggest that even the FBI’s expanded list is missing four of every five Americans who have been ruled mentally dangerous to themselves or others.

“If people realized how weak our system is in terms of background checks for people who are dangerously mentally ill, they would be shocked,” Helmke said. “It’s clear that there could be another Virginia Tech killer buying a gun today, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

The vast majority of the individuals who were added to the FBI’s list were identified by the state of California, which provided more than 200,000 names to the FBI in October, the Justice Department said.

Ohio provided more than 7,000 new names, and the number of states reporting mental health data to the FBI this year grew from 23 to 32, officials said.

“Instant background checks are essential to keeping guns out of the wrong hands, while still protecting the privacy of our citizens,” U.S. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey said in a speech announcing the numbers in Park City, Utah. “But as we learned in the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the checks must be accurate and complete to be effective. We’re making progress, and I hope that even more states will submit this information.”

The Virginia Tech massacre, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history, has prompted a push by federal and state lawmakers to improve voluntary reporting by the states of those covered by the ban.