The one-year anniversary of a tragic killing from South Bend, Indiana, illustrates many of the weaknesses in our gun laws: in a single incident, we have law enforcement officers being shot and killed, by someone who never should have been allowed to purchase a firearm in the first place, but who still passed a background check because of incomplete records, from a corrupt gun dealer at a gun show.

On April 24, 2007, South Bend Police Corporal Nick Polizzotto was shot and killed, and Patrolman Michael Norby was wounded, in a shootout at the Wooden Indian Motel.

They were shot by a man who had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution and who bought a gun at a gun show from a licensed dealer who later pleaded guilty and is now serving Federal prison time for falsifying Brady background check records.

Worse still, the gun dealer’s dishonesty was only part of the story. Because the states do such a poor job of providing records of the dangerously mentally ill to the Brady background check system, the shooter’s dangerous mental history didn’t prevent him from buying his gun.

The NICS Improvement Act – which gives states monetary incentives to supply records to the Brady background check system – should help prevent other mentally dangerous gun buyers from getting guns in the future from licensed gun dealers who follow the law.

Unlike West Virginia, however, which passed legislation less than a month ago to address this problem, states like Indiana have yet to forward any records of the dangerously mentally ill to NICS.

The following is from a powerful piece that ran last week on South Bend’s CBS affiliate, WSBT-TV. The video is here. You can read more about this tragic story here, here, and here.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE LAW

It’s been 40 years since Congress banned the sale of firearms to anyone deemed “mentally defective” by a judge, and today, answering “yes” to “question 11-F” on a federal background check means an automatic disqualification for a handgun permit or purchase.

It reads, simply: “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution?”

It’s aimed at preventing scenes like the one that played out on the campus of Virginia Tech just over one year ago. The gunman there, Sung Hui Cho, was responsible for the worst massacre on a college campus in U.S. history.

Court records show Cho was also ordered to receive mental health treatment by a judge who also declared him “dangerously mentally ill.”

But he never went.

Even so, his background check came back clean.

So did Barnaby’s, the day after the gun he bought illegally was used to kill Polizzotto.

Former Bristol firearms dealer Ronald Wedge was sentenced to serve prison time for falsifying information on Barnaby’s application, and allowing him to buy the gun before his background check cleared.

But the fact remains, it did clear.

The question for lawmakers in both Indiana and Virginia one year ago, was why?

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

They quickly found that the answers lie in the mental health records kept by each state in the nation. Just over 30 states share some, or all of those records with the federal government. In our area, Illinois recently began sharing many of their records, and Michigan is one of the few states in the country that shares nearly all their records.

But some states share none of their mental health records. That means all records of treatment, including treatment ordered by a court, is not included in the FBI’s NICS database used to check the backgrounds of potential gun buyers.

In other words, in many cases, the FBI has no way of knowing whether or not that buyer has ever had any sign of mental illness.

One year ago, as Scott Barnaby pulled the trigger, Indiana was one of those states.
Today, it still is, and Nick’s brother Tony Polizzotto calls that unacceptable.

“It seems like a no brainer to me,” he said. “Half the states [still] don’t have this law in action. And it’s something that really needs to be brought to the forefront.”

In the wake of Polizzotto’s shooting and the campus shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, it has been brought to the forefront in the Hoosier state.

Brady Background checks make it harder for dangerous people to get guns, but they only work when the states send in the proper information. Indiana – indeed, most of the country – needs to do a much better job in reporting those who have been defined as “prohibited purchasers� by Federal law since 1968 to this database.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

That was the headline, two days before Halloween, when the Washington Post turned over an ugly rock too long ignored by our elected officials.

Now, a whole host of terrifying facts about gun shows in America have crawled out. In a nutshell, this report says that Mexican gangsters are at war, and they’re shooting each other with guns bought in unregulated sales at American gun shows. To do it, the gangsters exploit what is known as the gun show loophole. They find so-called “private sellers� at gun shows, who can sell whole arsenals of weapons without ever running a background check.

Here are a few of the most powerful quotes from the article:

• “…unlicensed sellers can sell ‘personal collections’ at weekend gun shows without background checks.â€�

• “…unscrupulous sellers and buyers have taken advantage of the system … setting up phony personal collections booths and making quick sales that are difficult to trace.â€�

• “Arizona and Texas have become a ‘gunrunner’s paradise’….â€�

• “…arms traffickers have left Mexico awash in AK-47s, pistols, telescope sighting devices, grenades, grenade launchers and high-powered ammunition, such as the so-called cop-killer bullets believed to be able to penetrate bulletproof vests.â€�

• “Among the new weapons of choice for Mexican drug dealers are so-called variants of AK-47s and AR-15 assault rifles….â€�

• “An AK-47 that sells for $200 to $800 at an Arizona gun show can be sold for four times that much in Mexico….â€�

• “‘You’re looking at the same firepower here on the border that our soldiers are facing in Iraq and Afghanistan’….â€�

• “…law enforcement officers on both sides of the border have never seen anything like the flood of guns now surging into Mexico.â€�

Drugs from Mexico come in, and American guns go out.

What’s Washington’s answer? The report says that President Bush has “proposed [a] $500 million U.S. aid package to help Mexico battle [drug] cartels.� That’s right: according to the article, we could be sending the Mexican government half a billion dollars to fight Mexican drug gangs armed with guns bought right here in America. But that’s plainly slamming the door shut after the horse has left the barn.

Remember: unregulated gun show sales are how Eric Harris and Dylan Kleybold got their guns before they murdered 12 and wounded 22 others at Columbine High School. It’s how Michael Fortier – an accomplice of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh – sold many of the guns they stole from an Arkansas gun collector. It’s how Ali Boumelhem – a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah – bought an arsenal of shotguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, flash suppressors and assault weapons parts for export to Lebanon. And it’s how Muhammad Navid Asrar – who may also have had a link to al-Qaeda – bought an arsenal of his own, “including a Sten submachine gun, a Ruger Mini-14 rifle, two pistols and a hunting rifle.�

These are just some of the highest-profile examples, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We should never have to read about another school shooting fueled by an unregulated gun show sale. We should never have to read about another accused terrorist arming himself at a gun show. We should never have to read about how gun shows in America arm the drug gangs in Mexico.

Enough already.

The Washington Post article should spur our elected officials to answer a few basic questions:

• Why do the President and Congress permit gun shows in America to arm Mexican drug gangs?

• How can the gun lobby defend these disgraceful business practices as they continue their efforts to keep the gun show loophole open?

• What will it take for the President and Congress to stare down the gun pushers and close the gun show loophole, once-and-for-all?

Now is the time to act: Require a background check for every single gun sale in America. We make it too easy for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons.

No background check? No sale. NO EXCEPTIONS.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

The victims of gun violence include working-class families in our nation’s cities, high school students in the suburbs, as well as rural Americans who suffer in high numbers from our nation’s gun suicide problem. Urban America, however, suffers from a gun violence epidemic out of all proportion to the rest of the country. This is especially the case in the African-American community.

In August, the U.S. Department of Justice released a special report [pdf document] titled, Black Victims of Violent Crime, that showed just how staggering the difference is. “While blacks accounted for 13% of the U.S. population in 2005,� the report said, “they were victims in … nearly half [49%] of all homicides.�

The report continued, “Black victims of homicide were most likely to be male (85%) and between ages 17 and 29 (51%). …About 53% of homicides against blacks in 2005 took place in areas with populations of at least 250,000 people, compared to about 33% of homicides of white victims.� With regard to guns, the DOJ reported that “[b]lacks were killed with firearms in about 77% of homicides against them in 2005, compared to 60% of white homicide victims.�

These numbers may be new to some, but the experiences behind them are far too familiar for too many of our fellow Americans. Too many men, women and young people go to work and school every day and play by the rules, only to then worry about dodging bullets on their way home. And way too many of us feel that this state of affairs is “normal,� or isn’t really our concern, and that there’s nothing we can do to make these neighborhoods safer.

That’s wrong. It should concern us all, and there is much we can do.

While social scientists and dedicated community activists work hard to address the social issues related to this violence, we should do everything we can on the other side of the equation to keep illegal guns off the street and out of criminal hands – to give social policies a chance to work, and law-abiding residents of a neighborhood the chance to live and prosper.

In the short run, bills like the NICS Improvement Act – designed to fill the “records gap� in the Brady gun purchasing background check system – are a step in the right direction. It is stalled in the Senate, so we should do all we can to see that it is brought to a vote as soon as possible. But there is much, much more we can do in the effort to drastically cut gun murders: Limit bulk firearm purchases to reduce illegal gun sales; increase funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to crack down on corrupt gun dealers who sell to obvious “straw purchasers� and don’t follow the rules; and, require a background check for every single gun sale. No background check, no sale. No exceptions.

The DOJ report reveals a serious and complex problem. No single organization can solve it alone. But we can each do our part to make America safer, and I hope you will join us in that effort.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)