The House of Representatives has just passed a new gun control bill. Before anyone starts crying foul, note that the NRA supports this legislation, which would require states to automate their lists of convicted criminals and the mentally ill who are prohibited under a 1968 law from buying firearms. States would be required to report those lists to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
"As the Virginia Tech shooting reminded us, there is an urgent national need to improve the background check system to keep guns out of the hands of those barred from buying them", House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.
Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech who killed 32 students and staff before committing suicide, had previously been ordered to undergo outpatient mental health treatment. This should have banned him from buying the weapons that he used in the shootings. Regretably, the state of Virginia never forwarded this information to the national background check system and his background checks therefore came back clean.
If the bill passes through the Senate and is signed into law by the president, it would be one of the first gun control measures to pass since 1994, when Congress prohibited juveniles from owning or selling handguns.
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