Naming names

Saturday, Feb. 23, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

Seung-Hui Cho, the man who shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech last year, should never have been able to buy a gun, but he slipped through the cracks.

He was, by federal law, ineligible to buy a gun because he had been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, but his name was never added to the database that federally licensed gun dealers have to check before selling someone a gun.

The problem, USA Today reported Tuesday, is that many states have been slow to add names to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which includes the names of felons, fugitives and others who are not allowed to buy guns.

Federal law does not mandate that states cooperate, and that has meant the database has had huge holes in it. By some estimates the names of 80 percent to 90 percent of the people who have been found mentally incompetent by a judge are not in the system.

Under a bill signed into law last month, states will be given grants to set up systems to get information into the database. The law will penalize states that don’t submit names by withholding law enforcement grants.

“It’s going to be a real incentive for the states,” said Bobby Hamil, the FBI official in charge of the database. “Clearly, we’re going to see more records coming.”

That will be a good step toward protecting citizens and making the law work. Obviously, it isn’t a panacea, but the federal database is a significant obstacle to obtaining a gun. The database, however, is hobbled by the lack of names in it.

No one knows whether Cho would have been stopped had his name been in the database as it should have been, but the database wasn’t given a chance to work. States should work quickly to update the database because, as the Virginia Tech shooting proved, this is an issue of public safety.