COLUMBUS, Ga. — The man who killed two people in a Louisiana movie theater last week was able to purchase a gun legally despite a judge’s order sending him to a mental hospital in 2008 because he was never committed for involuntarily treatment, a county probate judge said Monday.
“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,” said Muscogee County Probate Judge Marc E. D’Antonio, who was the county’s chief clerk at the time. “I clearly would have known. That did not happen.”
An involuntary commitment would have banned John Houser from buying a gun under the sweeping federal gun law that passed after the Virginia Tech mass shooting in 2007.
But Houser never reached the crucial stage of having a judge rule on his mental competence, D’Antonio said.
As a result, Houser’s purchase of a .40-caliber semi-automatic handgun at a Phenix City, Ala., pawn shop last year was perfectly legal, setting up a tragedy in Lafayette, La., and exposing what gun control advocates say is a troubling loophole in the federal law that governs who may acquire firearms legally.
Houser’s brush with institutionalization began in spring 2008, when he showed up unannounced in the small town of Carrollton, Ga., and barged into his daughter’s office to object to her upcoming wedding.
It was an ominous and threatening scene, the family’s attorney said in a court petition — the latest example of Houser’s “volatile mental state.”
A judge signed what was known as an “order to apprehend” Houser, and sheriff’s deputies whisked him away to a mental hospital in Columbus, according to court papers.
Following standard procedure in Georgia, doctors could have evaluated and examined Houser for up to a week before making the key decision about what to do with him.
At that point, they could release him, persuade him to be admitted by his own agreement or petition a local probate court judge to commit him involuntarily for treatment — a formal judgment called an adjudication.
Neither a release nor a voluntary stay in the hospital would have resulted in Houser’s hospitalization being reported up the chain to state authorities and to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System federal database, according to interviews with law enforcement officials and legal experts in Georgia.
A spokesman for the state hospital system and a spokeswoman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Monday that they were working to provide answers about Houser’s case.
In recent years, Georgia and other states have varied widely in their interpretations of the mental health clauses in the federal Gun Control Act.
A recent proposal filed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that federal authorities have long been aware that state officials are confused about the entire process and may be unsure as to what constitutes involuntary commitment or an adjudication of “mental defectiveness.” The latter is a term so dated, used from the 1930s to the 1960s, that some officials say it’s now offensive to the mentally ill.
In their proposal, they seek to rewrite the rules to better define the two terms.
