Scott Finn, staff writer for the Charleston Gazette, has written a series of articles covering the State’s mental health system. For various reasons (not the least of which is the fear of following in the footsteps of Dooce and Amber Nykol), I haven’t written about those articles, though I’ve had a lot that I wanted to say about them.

I did, though, want to comment on an article from this weekend, titled ‘This didn’t have to happen’. For the same reason that I completely avoided writing about other articles, I’m keeping my comments restricted to a few very specific points. That’s not to say I don’t want to speak to other points, though.

It is a felony to sell a firearm to someone who has been committed to a mental institution. Violators can be punished by up to 10 years in jail.

But in West Virginia and 44 other states, gun dealers have no way to check.

The National Rifle Association supported a bill in Congress that would have encouraged states to turn over mental-health records to the National Crime Information Center in Clarksburg, which conducts background checks for gun purchases.

But another lesser-known group blocked the bill, the Virginia-based Gun Owners of America.

Between 1997 and 2003, Gun Owners of America has outspent the NRA in Washington lobbying — $18 million to $11 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill joined the Gun Owners of America to oppose the bill. Not everyone who is committed to a mental institution should lose the right to bear arms forever, the groups say.

Regardless of whether one believes it is right to forbid everyone committed to a mental institution from owning a weapon, it seems obvious that, if there is a law in place that already forbids selling the weapons, dealers have to have a way to check. The state of Alabama has a system in place to check this, without violating patient privacy laws:

Today, the state of Alabama shares the names of people involuntarily committed to mental hospitals with the National Crime Information Center. If a background check is rejected, gun dealers are not told if it is because of a history of mental illness.

Even without a background check system, Doss said, the gun shop owner in Winfield and almost everyone else in town knew Frankie Adkins’ history.

Whatever “almost everyone in town” knows, you can’t expect a gun dealer to make decisions on whether or not to sell to someone based on rumors. Either they need a check to allow them to know for certain whether someone is legally allowed to own a weapon or not.

Given that the law already exists, it was, in my opinion, horribly irresponsible and short sighted for Gun Owners of America and NAMI to oppose legislation to allow gun dealers to determine whether or not it’s legal for them to sell to certain people. Why would anyone want the legal situation to be what it is now, where one is legally forbidden to sell to a certain group of people, without the means of knowing who falls in that group?

For NAMI, the position is excusable, even if I think they’re wrong. I can understand the desire to keep mental illness records private. For Gun Owners of America, though, opposing legislation that would help dealers comply with existing laws seems shortsighted. It seems that, if they’re truly supportive of gun owners’ rights, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot — not being able to fully comply with the law opens a lot of very bad consequences for dealers:

Delphia Doss and her daughter-in-law, Heidi, sued the owners of the Chief’s Place, Larry and Freda Jones, for selling Adkins the gun. In May, they agreed to a settlement of $2 million in damages.

But they don’t expect to see that money any time soon. The Joneses’ filed bankruptcy and moved to Florida, and their insurance company says it shouldn’t have to pay.

Attempts to reach Jones through his lawyer were unsuccessful.

Doss says she doesn’t care about the money. She only wanted to teach Jones a lesson, and now that he has declared bankruptcy, she feels deprived of that satisfaction.

Nevermind that it’s completely ludicrous to want to punish someone for not complying with a law that it would be illegal for them to comply with in the first place, due to federal privacy laws. She drove the couple into bankruptcy and doesn’t think she’s punished them enough? What does she want? The head of their firstborn on a silver platter?