Alabama contributes small number of mental health records to FBI ...

?Our state and our nation need to do more in dealing with mental health issues,? - Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- While on leave from a mental health treatment program Farron Barksdale walked into a north Alabama gun shop Christmas Eve 2003 and bought a semi-automatic assault rifle that he would use nine days later to gun down two Athens police officers.

In the aftermath of that shooting, Alabama lawmakers passed a law aimed at requiring Alabama to start reporting certain involuntary mental health commitment records to be included in the FBI's National Instant Background Check System (NICS). That system is used by gun dealers to screen out those barred from buying guns.

Eight years later the state is only reporting a small fraction of the number of involuntary commitments it has each year due to restrictions in that 2004 law. But on the heels of the Sandy Hook Elementary School and other tragic mass shootings nationwide involving mentally disturbed individuals several officials say it's time the state broaden the law so more state mental health records can be sent to NICS.

"It's very narrow ... I do think we've got to expand it," said Jefferson County Probate Judge Sherri Friday, who handles commitment hearings.

Friday said she handles 25 to 30 involuntary commitments each week but rarely do they meet the exceptions under the Alabama law for reporting to NICS.

Since 2004, the records of 245 people submitted by Alabama probate judges have been added into the NICS system, said Lynn Childs, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center. That includes four names added so far this year.

In comparison, nearly 5,000 admissions to Alabama Department of Mental Health state psychiatric hospitals have occurred in the past two years. The majority of them were involuntary commitments, according to Jeff Shackelford, a spokesman for that department.

As of last year, about 1.64 million mental health records had been submitted into the NICS.

The reason probate judges say only a tiny portion of involuntary commitments make it into the NICS system is because of a restriction in the Alabama law that requires them to report only involuntary commitments where a police officer has testified that the person has used a weapon or could be a threat to use a weapon.

"Whether it (the law) has had the value that the legislature was trying to reach, I don't know," said Shelby County Probate Judge Jim Fuhrmeister. "The vast majority of cases I see in involuntary commitments do not involve firearms."

Fuhrmeister and Friday said they would support having all involuntary commitments in Alabama placed into NICS. But both judges added that there would also have to be a way to remedy an error in placing someone's records into the system and a way for names to be eventually removed.

"You shouldn't be necessarily branded for life," Fuhrmeister said.

The 2004 law does have an appeal process, which basically involves the person going back to the probate judge and asking that their name be removed.

The appeals process in the current law is preventing Alabama from applying for some of the millions of dollars in grant money under the NICS Act Record Improvement Program, Childs said. That money is designed to help states improve its NICS records collection programs.

Under federal law for a state to qualify for that money it must have an appeals process that meets the principles of due process, Childs said. Because Alabama's law does not have a separate court or body to appeal to other than returning to the probate judge, then the state law doesn't meet those guidelines, she said.

"If we could qualify for the grant money then the state could possibly become its own NICS provider," Childs said.

The group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in a report and interactive map released last year, ranks Alabama one of the worst performing states when it comes to providing mental health records for NICS.

"Why does this matter? 336,102 gun background checks were conducted in Alabama in 2011 using this incomplete database, which fails to block gun sales to the millions of prohibited purchasers whose mental health records are not in the system," mayors group website states.

Under the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act ratified in 1993 and launched in 1998, a person has to be cleared to buy any type of gun through screening under the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Alabama is among 30 states that rely solely on the NICS system for background checks at gun shops. Private sales, such as at gun shows in Alabama, are not subject to background checks. Other states rely entirely on their own system or have created one that partially relies on NICS.

Until its 2004 law, Alabama didn't provide any mental health records to the system.

Federal law prohibits certain people from buying a gun, including those adjudicated mental defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution or incompetent to handle their own affairs. That includes dispositions to criminal charges of found not guilty by reason of insanity or found incompetent to stand trial.?

Gun sales

Gun buyers must first fill out a federal form that includes questions about their criminal and mental backgrounds. If the person lies on the form and their mental history hasn't been reported into NICS they won't be flagged for gun dealer to deny the sale.

But gun shop owners don't rely on the NICS alone to determine whether to sell to someone.

When a customer shows up wanting to buy a gun at Hoover Tactical Firearms and appears mentally disturbed, clerks won't ring up the sale, said Austin Cook, general manager of that store. "It's not a medical determination. We'll just base it off a gut feeling," he said.

Gun shops can deny the sale of a gun to anyone for any reason, Cook said. "If this guy's just way off, we won't sell him anything," he said.

Buying a rifle such as the Bushmaster .223 used by the Newtown, Conn., shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School requires the same scrutiny under the federally mandated FBI criminal background check system as when purchasing any other gun.

Brad Williamson at Quint's Sporting Goods in Saraland and Dubby Hannon, owner of McCoy Outdoor Sports in Mobile said the system may have shortcomings when screening people with mental-health issues. Both noted complications caused by doctor-patient confidentiality tenets.

While national databases exist to track a person's past criminal history, other factors the background check screens to determine if a person can legally buy a gun such as mental health and/or current drug dependency, rely almost solely on the person truthfully answering questions on the form.

"For everything in the background check, there's some type of database. Even if you're a drug addict, I imagine you've run afoul of the law somewhere in the past. The only crack in the background-check system is with mental health," Williamson said. "I've read statistics where lots of people in this country are on some type of anti-depressant or other drug to deal with mental health issues. They've never been committed, so my question is, how do you take the rights away from people before they've done something?"

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics from 2008 and widely reported in 2011 found that 11 percent of Americans were taking anti-depressants, a 400-percent increase since 1994.

Media reports indicate that the Sandy Hook shooter obtained the guns he used from his mother. Williamson noted that the guns used in Colorado and at Virginia Tech mass slayings were found to have been legally purchased by the assailants. "I hate to see a more-stringent background check, but maybe we could do something about developing a national mental-health database," he said.

Mental health records reporting is only a small part of the solution to preventing guns being used by someone with a mental health issue in an act of violence.

Friday, Fuhrmeister and others say the real problem is paying more attention and money to helping the mentally ill.

"Our state and our nation need to do more in dealing with mental health issues," said Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely, whose department investigated the Barksdale slayings of the two police officers. "The last thing we need to be cutting back in Alabama on is mental health."

al.com reporter Jeff Dute contributed to this report

Updated at 7:49 p.m. to correct number of total mental health records in NICS nationally Updated at 11:34 a.m. Dec. 21 to correct that Alabama does not have a separate appeals process for getting names of mental health patients off the NICS list

Source: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/12/alabama_contributes_small_numb.html

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