I went to buy a gun. I didn’t want or need one, but I had to see if I could.
Walking into my local gun shop, I found myself surrounded by walls of them — and assaulted by an unwanted memory of a phone call I got in 2011 from my brother. “Mom found Dad’s body in the back seat of his car,” he told me, “with the receipt for the bullets.”
That was the worst loss firearms had brought me, but it wasn’t the only one: My childhood Sunday School teacher and three high school friends also took their own lives using guns.
I cleared my throat and held tears at bay. I wanted to make this fast, so I pointed to one of the neatly arrayed shotguns, sleek and black. “Oh, the Benelli Nova! This here is a fan favorite.” The salesman lifted the gun to his shoulder, squinted his eye and pretended to aim at a target.
I have a history of suicidal feelings, and I was committed to a mental hospital in 2007 and in 2015. I absolutely should not own a gun. My entire body started to tremble.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“The Benelli sounds great,” I told him. He tried to hand it to me, and I just stared, my hands glued to my sides. “Here, try it out!” he urged. “The gorgeous Benelli Nova.”
Sweat dripped down my neck. “I’ve been in a psychiatric hospital,” I blurted.
“We can work that out,” he reassured me.
“Twice,” I stuttered. “I’ve been in a mental hospital twice. I have a mental illness.”
He paused, looking me over as I stood there. “You don’t look like someone who is mentally ill.”
I don’t know what he thought someone who is mentally ill would look like, but of course, you can’t know a person’s mental health from a glance. And yet, a person’s mental health has everything to do with whether they should own a gun. Disturbed, I left the store without saying another word.
My attempted purchase was a private social experiment: I wanted to find out how likely it was that a person with my history could walk into a store and buy a firearm.
On paper, federal law prohibits selling a gun to anyone with a history of involuntary commitment to a mental health or substance-abuse treatment facility, or whom a court has declared incompetent. Licensed gun sellers, by law, must conduct background checks. But mental health reporting laws vary state to state, and federal law cannot require states to submit the relevant records to the government agencies that facilitate background checks. States can voluntarily submit this information but often fail to do so, leaving the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database incomplete and inaccurate.
In addition, some 19 states and D.C. have red-flag laws, which allow law enforcement officials or family members to get court orders to block a person from accessing firearms if they pose a threat to themselves or others. Even so, these laws are imperfect, as was demonstrated yet again by the recent mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. The 19-year-old shooter legally purchased two semi-automatic rifles even after police had confiscated a shotgun from him in response to his mother’s concerns about his mental state. The county prosecutor did not invoke the red-flag law that could have prevented that purchase. He later told reporters that the law didn’t allow his office enough time to subpoena the records that would build a winning case; losing that case would require the return of the shotgun.
I decided to make my next attempted purchase at a national chain store that sells items from farm and pet supplies to automotive parts to food, clothing, toys — and, of course, firearms.
The saleswoman took my driver’s license as I filled out the federal form on a store computer. I carefully answered each question: Had I ever been convicted of a felony? Do I use illegal drugs? I marked “no” for all of them, until I came to the one asking whether I had ever been committed to a mental institution. I clicked “yes” and pressed “submit.”
“You are unable to purchase a gun,” the saleswoman said kindly.
I let out an enormous breath of relief. I must have failed the background check.
Then she said: “You disqualified yourself.” Since I’d answered “yes,” the law prohibited her from running the FBI background check. But if I had lied, she added, the system would have let me through. “I have not had a person denied a gun purchase for mental health reasons,” she said. “You would have passed.”
From what I can tell, she was right. In 2007, an emergency room doctor in Louisiana deemed me a danger to myself and involuntarily committed me to a psychiatric hospital. Currently, the state does not report all involuntary commitments, only those ordered by a court; mine does not qualify. Neither my suicide attempt in 2015 nor my psychiatric stay in Missouri were required to be reported to the database.
It should go without saying that people with mental illnesses are not inherently violent: A 2019 study by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing found that the mentally ill commit 4% of all violent crime in the U.S.
But, according to that 2019 study, about a third of mass shootings are carried out by people with a serious mental illness. It gets especially stark when we weigh the possibility that gun owners may harm themselves. Suicides account for some 60% of U.S. gun deaths. Ninety percent of those who attempt suicide with a gun die, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, whereas more than 95% of those who attempt suicide without a gun survive. Restricting access to firearms won’t eliminate suicide, but it could save many lives.
After the March mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., the Biden administration announced that the Justice Department would “publish model ‘red flag’ legislation for states.” The president renewed his call for lawmakers to take action on gun violence after the mass shooting in San Jose on Wednesday. But unless states adopt such legislation and share the information that would make the NICS database complete, accurate and effective – too many people will slip past these safeguards.
My experiment taught me that our system relies heavily on individuals to tell the truth about their mental health histories. If I had been even slightly more determined to buy a firearm, I would have one right now. I went home without a gun. But I wish the law had stopped me.
Sonja Wasden is a mental health advocate and co-author of “An Impossible Life.”