![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/memorial.banner.jpg)
How was he allowed to buy a gun?
It's the question people are asking after learning that Aaron Alexis, the shooter in the Washington Navy Yard massacre Monday, had been involved in at least two prior shooting incidents and as recently as August sought the assistance of police in Rhode Island because he was hearing voices.
The answer is simple: He walked into the Sharpshooters gun range and store in Newington, Virginia, submitted his name to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System, on which 174,623,643 background checks have been run since 1998, and came up clean. His gun incidents never led to criminal convictions. He was not a resident of Virginia and did not show up in any state databases. Whatever mental issues he had, they did not rise to the level of an involuntary commitment or a legal judgment that he was "mentally defective." When he sought medical care for insomnia in recent weeks, he denied being depressed or thinking of hurting himself or others.
As gun rights advocates have been quick to point out, nothing in Congress's failed spring effort to extend background checks would have stopped Alexis's ability to purchase the weapon he used to launch the slaughter of 12 innocent people starting their workday at a military installation.
This is the great problem at the heart of efforts to turn improved mental health reporting into our primary form of gun control. More than half of Americans experience one or more mental illnesses over the course of their lives, and around 26 percent of Americans over age 18 each year experience at least one, primarily anxiety disorders and mood disorders like depression. The overwhelming majority of them are no danger to anyone at all. But with so substantial a portion of the country going through bouts of one thing or another over the course of their lives, the idea that any federal database could capture enough information to encompass every one who might one day be a threat anywhere is akin to hoping for a government staff of precogs. And that's not even getting into the highly problematic question of whether the government should mark millions of people who will never hurt anyone for a carve-out from the Second Amendment, and the privacy and stigmatization issues involved in cataloging harmless people who suffer from common mental illnesses in order to label them as potential threats in a federal government database.