On March 13, 2007, a Virginia Tech student walked into a Roanoke gun store, armed with a credit card. A short time later, Seung-Hui Cho walked out of Roanoke Firearms, armed with a Glock 9 mm pistol.
It was an unremarkable transaction. Cho said or did little to draw attention to himself, and a computer background check found no felony convictions or mental health commitments that would have barred him from buying a gun.
Yet it soon became clear — after Cho used the Glock and a second handgun to kill 32 students and professors, then himself, on the Tech campus four years ago today — that the system had failed.
Cho, it turned out, had been court-ordered to receive outpatient mental treatment. That made it illegal for him to have a gun. But at the time, only commitments to mental hospitals were included in the database used to screen potential gun buyers.
After Cho slipped through a crack in the system and went on to commit the largest mass shooting in modern U.S history, Virginia rushed to change its law to add outpatient commitments to the database.
Four years later, the number of mentally ill people stopped from buying a gun has nearly doubled.
The background checks blocked 215 transactions last year, compared with 109 the year of the shootings, according to figures compiled by Virginia State Police. And the database has grown by 63 percent, to 145,728 mental health records at the end of last year.
“I’m very encouraged to hear the numbers,” said Lori Haas, a board member of the Virginia Center for Public Safety, a group dedicated to reducing gun violence. Haas joined the organization after her daughter, Emily, was wounded in the Tech shootings.
“That means that somewhere out there, there are dangerous people who might have had a gun prior to 2007,” she said. “And who knows how many lives that has saved.”
Even before the Tech shootings, Virginia had been doing more than most states when it comes to collecting records of mental health commitments for its database, which it shares with federal authorities for nationwide checks.
Virginia now has more records per 100,000 residents than any other state, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an association of more than 500 mayors led by Michael Bloomberg of New York.
With the loophole now closed, Virginia’s database includes records of mentally ill people who fall into four categories: those found to be incapacitated; those found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity; those involuntarily sent to inpatient or outpatient treatment; and those who agree to a commitment after being held on a temporary detention order.
City and county court systems, where special justices hear mental commitment cases, are responsible for reporting the data to state police.
Illness not a predictor
The shootings at Tech, and more recently the mass shooting in Arizona that critically wounded a congresswoman, have sometimes put mental illness and violence under the same spotlight.
“We perpetuate a myth when we do that,” said Diane Kelly, executive director of Mental Health America of Roanoke Valley. “I just think we need to remind people that mental illness is not a predictor of violent behavior.”
Mental health records are a small part of a background check database, compiled by state police. Also included are other people barred from having a gun, including convicted felons, people with protective orders filed against them and those with domestic violence misdemeanor convictions.
Last year, the 215 transactions blocked for mental reasons represented a small fraction of the 2,994 total sales stopped by the record checks.
“We take very seriously the firearms transactions process and the prohibitions concerning the transfer of a firearm to an individual,” said Lt. Col. Robert Kemmler, who heads the state police Bureau of Administrative and Support Services.
‘Loophole’ still exists
While acknowledging some progress over the past four years, gun control advocates say Virginia could be doing more.
Only licensed gun sellers are required to conduct the background checks, leaving prohibited buyers unchecked when they go to private dealers or other sources.
“It makes little sense to have the best record-keeping system in the country, but still allow up to 40 percent of the sales to go through without background checks,” said Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
Since the Tech shootings, expanding the mental health database has been the only restriction on gun rights to come out of Virginia’s firearm-friendly legislature.
The General Assembly has repeatedly killed bills to close the so-called “gun show loophole,” which allows private dealers to make unchecked sales at weekend gun shows that draw thousands.
In recent years, the Tech shootings have become a rallying cry for closing the loophole — to the consternation of guns rights advocates who point out that Cho purchased neither of his weapons at a gun show.
“It was just astounding,” Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said of the efforts to link the shootings and gun show sales. “It had nothing to do with that.”
Some states lag behind
Reverberations from the Tech shootings eventually reached Congress, which passed a law to improve the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Included in the measure were funds to encourage more states to report mental health commitments. Despite the incentives, 28 states have submitted fewer than 100 records — 10 of them offered none at all — to the national database, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
The database held 1.1 million records at the end of last year. An estimated 1.6 million records are still missing.
Even in conforming states like Virginia, the gaps can have consequences. For example, someone living in Virginia who was committed to a mental hospital in another state that did not submit its records could easily pass a background check.
“To make a comprehensive improvement here, you really have to look at it 50 different ways,” said Colin Goddard, assistant director of federal legislation for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Some states lack the resources to report their mental health records to the federal government, others say they are prohibited by privacy laws. In trying to improve the system, Goddard said he prefers to work at the national level.
Like Haas, Goddard became involved with gun control through a personal experience: He was shot four times by Cho.
“With the political climate in Virginia … it’s very upsetting to me as someone who lived through a very horrible situation,” Goddard said. “It’s not like I’ve given up on Virginia, I don’t want to use that word. But I go to where I think the battle is more winnable, and I see that at the federal level.”