Lafayette theater shooting exposes key loophole in gun laws
John Houser was mentally unstable, so much so that twice judges demanded his cognitive well-being be professionally evaluated. Yet he was still legally able to purchase a handgun in an Alabama pawn shop that ended up being used in the killing of two people, as well as his own suicide, at a Lafayette, La., theater last week.
In 1989, John Houser tried to pay a man $100 to burn down the office of a lawyer who represented a pornographic movie theater to "save the world, bring law and order," according to a court transcript.
But his intended arsonist turned out to be a police informant. The judge in the case, citing "the presence of a delusional compulsion," ordered that Houser be evaluated at the psychiatric unit at a Columbus, Ga., hospital.
In April 2008, the then-23-year-old daughter of Houser was planning to marry her fiance the following month. But Houser believed they were too young. He made "ominous as well as disturbing statements," his family wrote in seeking a court order to keep him away. His wife, Kellie Maddox Houser, wrote that she was so worried about his unraveling mental state, she removed all his guns from the house.
Houser later stormed into his daughter's office, then to another relative's house, where police were called and intervened.
The Washington Post reports that a judge then signed an "order to apprehend," leading to his removal by police to a mental hospital.
However, Houser was never technically involuntarily committed to stay at the mental health hospital, which would have been necessary to land his name on a national database, according to the judge in the case.
"If he had been adjudicated in need of involuntary treatment, I would have reported that to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who would then send it to the FBI," Muscogee County Probate Judge Marc E. D'Antonio, who was the county's chief clerk at the time, told the Washington Post. "I clearly would have known. That did not happen."
According to the Post, Houser's mental health doctors had three choices when they got him: evaluate and release him, persuade him to stay on his own will, or ask a judge to force him to stay. The first two options still would have left him eligible for firearms purchases anywhere in the U.S., no matter his actual mental state.
The last option, involuntary commitment, was the only thing that might have kept new guns out of Houser's hands, but even that's not a guarantee.
States employ a wife variety of interpretations of the mental health clauses in the federal Gun Control Act, according to the Post. It's a situation the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is aware of, and has been trying to fix.
In an interview Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Houser "shouldn't have been able to buy a gun." He said if Houser had been involuntarily committed in Louisiana, that information would have been reported to the national background check system and would have prevented him from buying a gun.
"Every time this happens it seems like the person had a history of mental illness. We need to make sure that the systems we have in place actually work," Jindal said. He said that every state should strengthen their laws so that information is being reported to the background system and that system is working.
In a separate interview, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia said that he needs "Republican help" to expand the background check system. He worked with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, to do so in 2013 but the bill was voted down in the Senate.
"I need my friends on the Republican side of the aisle to help us with a most reasonable, seasonable path forward," Manchin said. "It's not gun control, it's just saying that, listen, if you go to a gun show, commercial transaction, we need to know who you are and if you've had a problem before, if you've been criminal or a mental problem. And if you go on the Internet. Those are two areas that we don't have personal contact."
In addition to closing loopholes in the background check system, Manchin said a lot of states and territories are not doing enough to inform the federal background check system of people who have faced a criminal prosecution or mental adjudication and should not be allowed to purchase a gun.
"If they do that we'll have a more accurate database. This person would have been caught," Manchin said. "I'm not saying they did anything wrong. But somehow that shouldn't have happened, him having a criminal record and also a mental problem on top of that. So he was kind of a double whammy on this."