State Mental Health data in FBI database

The rights of everyone else to know you're dangerous trump your rights to privacy. While the potential for abuse exists, this is a good thing.

States bolster FBI gun database - USATODAY.com:
"More states are turning over records to a federal database of mentally ill people barred from owning guns, nearly tripling the number in the system since the massacre at Virginia Tech last spring, the FBI says.

The tragedy spurred states to revisit their policies regarding the database. The FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which federally licensed gun dealers must consult before selling a gun, has about 402,000 records from 32 states of people declared mentally ill by a court, FBI records show. On April 1, 2007, two weeks before the Virginia Tech shooting, the database had 165,778 records from 22 states. The federal government cannot force states to transmit their records.

Illinois is one of the states that began sending mental-health records to the federal database after the Virginia Tech shooting. Steven Kazmierczak, the gunman who last week killed five students at Northern Illinois University before turning the gun on himself, was not in the database and purchased his guns legally, says Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

States send records only after a court has committed individuals for involuntary psychiatric treatment or found them to be dangerous to themselves or others. Kazmierczak, 27, had been seeing a psychiatrist in the months before the rampage, his girlfriend, Jessica Baty, told CNN.
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Hamil says he expects that a new law President Bush signed in January will prod even more states into sending records. It gives states grants to pay for collecting the information and transmitting it to the federal database. States that don't participate could lose federal money for law enforcement. "It's going to be a real incentive for the states," he says. "

The paranoid among us will say that now "they" can take our guns just by declaring anyone who wants a gun to be mentally ill - however, this qualification has always been a part of the paperwork filed when buying a gun from a dealer. This should make it easier to catch some people in a lie. It won't make the system perfect, but it may make it a little better.