January 10, 2011

The debate over whether Jared Lee Loughner was meaningfully influenced by vitriolic political rhetoric will never be satisfactorily settled. The 22-year-old man, accused of killing six and wounding 14 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, at a Tucson, Ariz., shopping center on Saturday, had made allusions to government overreach in largely incoherent ramblings in the months leading up to the tragedy. Whether he was encouraged to act -- even subtly -- by the gunplay symbolism of people like Sarah Palin, who placed Giffords' seat in the "cross hairs" of a national effort to defeat Democrats last November, is a matter for debate.

There is broad agreement, however, that Loughner exhibited abundant signs of schizophrenia. "We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me," a classmate at Pima Community College wrote in an e-mail to a friend last summer. "He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. ... I sit by the door with my purse handy."

Pima Community College suspended him last year for apparent mental problems. Officials at the Tucson school told him he could return only if he obtained "a mental health clearance indicating, in the opinion of a mental health professional, his presence at the College does not present a danger to himself or others."

Loughner also attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected for unspecified reasons.

Yet he passed a background check, and in late 2010 legally bought a 9 mm Glock 19 semi-automatic handgun -- the one allegedly used in Saturday's shootings.

He's not the first potentially unbalanced man to be associated with a recent mass murder. The shooter at the center of the 2007 Virginia Tech tragedy, Cho Seung-Hui, passed two federal gun background checks even after a state court determined that he was so mentally ill he represented a public danger.

The Tucson shootings offer many lessons. Here's an important one: Existing laws that forbid mentally ill individuals from buying and possessing firearms aren't worth much if interagency record-keeping and communications are lax. The national background-check system only works if it's fed relevant and timely information.

If institutions like Pima Community College are handcuffed by privacy considerations, Congress needs to provide a legislative solution for extreme cases such as these, when public safety is potentially threatened. Virginia Tech was horrific enough: For the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to have, in effect, allowed a mass killing of this nature to happen again is inexcusable.

It's sad that it has taken a tragedy of such magnitude for many Americans to reconsider the increasingly poisonous rhetoric of today's political debate. Although tea party supporters have taken much of the blame for the ill-tempered tenor of recent public discourse -- and not without good reason -- both sides have been guilty of violent imagery.

Reasonable, balanced people understand that it's all metaphor and symbolism. Mentally ill people are less apt to grasp that fact. It's time to rein things in.