Mental Health Checks for Gun Buyers: Weak, Chaotic, Full of Loopholes
Federal law technically prohibits sales of firearms to the mentally ill. Here's the reality.
—By Sydney Brownstone and Erika Eichelberger | Fri Dec. 21, 2012 8:04 AM PST

The tragedy in Newtown has revived a national debate about gun control, focusing attention on the laws (and loopholes) governing gun ownership in America, and raising a host of questions about how to prevent future Newtowns (and Auroras and Columbines and Virginia Techs). Chief among them is how to keep weapons out of the hands of mentally ill people. Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, whose mother was reportedly seeking to have her son committed to a mental institution, carried out the shootings with weapons that had been legally purchased by his mom, but across the country it's frighteningly easy for people with serious psychiatric problems to purchase weapons.

It's technically against federal law to sell guns to people with a severe mental illness, but in practice the background check system is so flawed it rarely filters out those with disqualifying psychiatric problems. There are a number of roadblocks to enforcing the law. One of them is that only gun sales by federally licensed arms dealers require background checks. That means a huge chunk—40 percent—of private gun sales don't require buyers to be vetted. (This is the so-called "gun show" loophole, though currently six states have laws that close it.) The law also defines disqualifying mental illness narrowly. It only forbids gun sales to people who have been determined by a court to be seriously mentally ill, or who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution. This means that the system often overlooks dangerous and disturbed people who don't have a paper trail.

But one of the biggest issues with the current background check system is that many states submit little to no mental health data to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Only 27 states authorize or require reporting pertinent mental health data to NICS, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Nearly half the states in the country submitted fewer than 100 records between 2004 and 2011. Seventeen states have submitted fewer than 10 records in total.

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There have been a couple attempts at the federal level to improve state reporting to NICS, but these efforts have done little to address the problem. After the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, Congress passed the NICS Improvement Amendments Act, which was supposed to give states federal money to overhaul their computer systems in order to get more mental health records on file. But, as the Center for Public Integrity reports, more than three years later, only five percent of the money had been appropriated to states. That's partly because, in order to receive funding, states had to comply with a provision forced into the law by the NRA that requires states to offer the mentally ill a chance to win back their gun rights. Many states didn't like this measure and turned down funding. The Violence Policy Center, a Washington-based gun control group, says the legislation was "hijacked by the gun lobby."
...emphasis added
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mental-health-background-check-newtown-shooting-adam-lanza