Obama Takes Executive Action on Gun Control After Senate Says No

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AUTHOR Bookworm

When Democrat Senators listened to their constituents and refused to give Harry Reid the votes he needed to pass any gun control bills, President Obama’s first reaction was to have a temper tantrum. Then, ignoring the fact that Congress is a legislative body that represents the will of the people, Obama announced that he was going to use his executive power to enact as many gun control regulations as possible. His first proposal, however, turns out to be a sensible one that seeks to undo the federal government’s own legislative tangle, which mandates, on the one hand, that states notify the federal government about people who are declared insane or incompetent and, on the other hand, prohibits states from revealing any information about people’s health, including their mental health.
Since 1968, federal law has prohibited gun sales to people who are officially deemed a danger to themselves or others, or who have been adjudicated insane or mentally incompetent to stand trial. In 1993, under the Brady Bill, Congress also instituted a background check system, which would track the insane, the incompetent, and the felonious, and then notify states that they were banned from buying guns. Seventeen states, however, are providing so few records to the federal government that it’s reasonable to believe that they are not fulfilling their obligation to give the federal government the data it needs to enable it to stop sales to these people.

Starting Friday, the Obama administration will work to remove barriers in the health privacy laws that prevent those seventeen states from reporting this information. The irony is that the main barrier to state communication is a federal law: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”), which Congress passed in 1996, primarily in response to fears about AIDS health records becoming public. Under HIPAA, health care providers are allowed to release only very limited information to the police or to courts.
After the the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, when the 1968 and 1993 federal laws ought to have stopped the killer from getting guns, Congress enacted legislation affirmatively requiring states to submit the mental health records or suffer a penalty. A 2012 review by the Government Accountability Office revealed, however, that several states believe in good faith that HIPAA prevented them from complying with the reporting requirements.  It is this conflict between federal laws that the President now says he is seeking to address.
It’s very easy to criticize the President because, especially when it comes to guns, he does so many things that offend conservative, constitutional values. However, it’s important to remember to give him credit when he does the right thing. From its first statement after the Sandy Hook massacre, the NRA has urged the government not to ban guns, but instead to focus on mental health issues. That’s what the President now says he is doing and, provided that he stops with making a time-tested, genuinely common sense measure work, he should be left alone to get on with the job.