USA Today Editorial

After Saturday's mass killings in Arizona, the question was as familiar as it was painful: "How did a crazy person like that ever get a gun?"
And the answer was the same as it has been after more gun massacres in the USA than anyone cares to remember: The laws that prohibit people with mental problems from buying guns are, so to speak, shot through with holes.

Under the federal law used in most states, the only people barred from purchasing a gun because of mental-health reasons are those who've been committed to a mental institution, or ruled mentally defective, by a court. Even then, states aren't required to report those findings to the federal database checked by gun stores.

A measure passed in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings provides grants to encourage states to report disqualifying mental illnesses to the federal database. But many states still don't. From the beginning of 2008 through last August, 13 states — including Alaska, New Mexico and Pennsylvania — have reported no one as having a disqualifying mental illness, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. During that same period, Arizona filed 4,465 reports, and California filed more than 53,000.

If there is one area where gun-rights supporters and gun-control activists ought to be able to cooperate, it's on keeping high-powered weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill. Yet, the killings just keep happening. Since 1980, there have been 13 mass shootings that claimed at least 10 victims. And the tolls are particularly grisly when deranged individuals obtain weapons that allow them to spray large numbers of bullets without having to stop and reload:

Before the Virginia Tech shootings, Seung Hui Cho had been found mentally dangerous by a court and ordered to get outpatient treatment. But the finding never made it to the federal database. Cho used several 15-round magazines to kill 32 students before shooting himself.

Jared Lee Loughner, the accused gunman in Saturday's spree in Arizona, appeared so disturbed to some classmates at a local community college that one wrote in an e-mail that she feared he would " come into class with an automatic weapon" one day. The school finally suspended him, saying he couldn't return without clearance from a mental health professional. Yet Loughner breezed into a local gun store, passed the instant background check and walked out with the
Glock and the 33-round magazine he allegedly used to kill six people and critically wound Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Striking the right balance between identifying those who pose a serious threat, and protecting the privacy of those who don't, is a delicate task, but it's one worth revisiting in Tucson's wake.

A far easier call is to reinstate the ban, which expired in 2004, on the sale of assault weapons and the high-capacity magazines like those used by Cho and Loughner. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., whose husband was gunned down in a mass shooting on the Long Island Railroad in 1993, is trying to restore the ban on such magazines. It will be an uphill fight against the powerful gun lobby.

Until Congress and states find better ways to keep guns — or, at the very least, the high-capacity magazines that make multiple killings easy — out of the hands of disturbed people, Americans will be asking the same questions after the next mass shooting.