Lafayette theater gunman was not involuntarily committed, didn’t enter database restriction gun righ

The gunman who shot 11 people in a Lafayette movie theater last week wasn’t added to a database of people prohibited from buying firearms because he had not been involuntarily committed, Georgia officials said Monday, although John “Rusty” Houser’s troubled mental health did send him into hospital care.

These statements help explain how Houser legally bought a handgun at a Phenix City, Alabama, pawn shop in 2014, six years after his family sought court protection from him, alleging he’d been violent.

Court records show a Carroll County, Georgia, judge ordered Houser to be apprehended for a psychiatric evaluation in 2008, but there are no records Houser was subsequently committed involuntarily, a different process that requires a formal hearing before a judge.

“If there had been an adjudication of need for involuntary treatment, I would have reported that to the (Georgia Bureau of Investigations),” said Marc D’Antonio, a Muscogee County, Georgia, probate judge who was the clerk of that court in 2008. D’Antonio would have had jurisdiction over any commitments to the Columbus hospital where Houser was sent for evaluation.

Read more: http://theadvocate.com/news/13025524-123/lafayette-theater-gunman-was-not