Let’s say your mental landscape is similar to that of Colby Sue Weathers back in 2012: suicidal, homicidal, paranoid, schizophrenic. Oh, and with a drug and alcohol problem. You are too disabled by mental illness-schizophrenia was diagnosed in 2011-and recurring hospitalizations to work. You are not great about maintaining your psychotropic drug regimen, which you administer inconsistently and sometimes to woozy excess. And you have an occasional hankering, occasionally satisfied, to consume a fifth of liquor. Your life is utterly out of control.
One trouble you probably don’t have-provided you live in the United States-is gaining access to a lethal firearm.
Earlier this month, Janet Delana filed a negligence suit against Odessa Gun & Pawn shop in Odessa, Mo. In May 2012, Odessa sold Delana’s daughter-Colby Sue Weathers-a Hi-Point .40 caliber pistol. According to the suit, Weathers, who was 38 at the time, had intended to shoot herself. She sat with the gun for an hour or so before abandoning her goal and informing her parents, who promptly got rid of the gun.
A few weeks later, in late June, the voices in Weathers’ head told her to buy another gun and kill herself. Having observed her daughter’s agitation, Delana said she called Odessa Gun & Pawn on June 25 and alerted an employee to her daughter’s chronic mental illness and current suicidal state. She asked that the shop refrain from selling Weathers a gun. Two dayslater, Weathers turned up at Odessa and bought another Hi-Point pistol. Weathers drove home, loaded two bullets and shot her father. “Dad is dead,” she texted her mother. He was.
The lawsuit, which was filed by lawyers for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, is “an uphill challenge,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, author of the excellent book Gun Fight. “Under the nation’s gun laws, the dealer was allowed to sell to someone without a criminal or mental illness record. It’s usually hard to pin responsibility for someone’s bad acts on a commercial establishment that merely supplied the equipment.”
Supplying the equipment is what the nation’s 140,000 federally licensed firearms dealers do for a living. And there is absolutely nothing in federal law requiring them to sell their wares in a manner that is socially responsible, discerning or protective of human life. Kevin Jamison, the lawyer for Odessa, told me, “The store went through all the proper legal procedures.”
And there you have the nub of the problem.The lawsuit doesn’t even claim that Odessa violated the law. Presumably, Weathers passed an instant background check before killing her father.
So for a suicidal, homicidal, paranoid schizophrenic with drug and alcohol problems to get a gun under U.S. federal laws, she basically has to do just one thing: ask.
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Francis Wilkinson is a member of the Bloomberg News editorial board.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 03/24/2014