More On Mental Illness and Firearms Disability

I found this rather disturbing but not surprising news item about Russell Eugene Weston, Jr. In case you have forgotten him already:

Russell Eugene Weston Jr. told a court-appointed psychiatrist that he stormed the U.S. Capitol last summer, killing two police officers, to prevent the United States from being annihilated by disease and legions of cannibals.

"He described his belief that time was running out and that if he did not come to Washington, D.C., he would become infected with Black Heva," wrote Sally C. Johnson, the psychiatrist who examined Weston last fall. Weston called this imaginary ailment the "most deadliest disease known to mankind" and said it was spread by the rotting corpses of cannibals' victims, Johnson wrote.

Weston told Johnson he went to the Capitol to gain access to what he called "the ruby satellite," a device he said was kept in a Senate safe. That satellite, he insisted, was the key to putting a stop to cannibalism.

The former mental patient told another doctor that he fatally shot officers Jacob J. Chestnut and John M. Gibson on July 24 because they were cannibals who were keeping him from the satellite.

The disturbing item that I found was this:

(CBS) Russell Weston bragged he was the son of John F. Kennedy, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart. He spoke to satellite dishes because he thought they carried his voice to Washington. He threatened neighbors. He'd been arrested and one day he was finally packed off by the state of Montana to a mental institution.

But despite all that, on the day of the Capitol Hill shootings, records show Weston had a valid permit from his home state of Illinois to buy all the guns and ammunition he pleased.

The reason for that according to Illinois State Police Dir. Gene Marlin, is that Weston lied on this gun permit application last year when he circled "No" to the question of whether he had ever been a mental patient. And when Illinois went to check it out, says Marlin, Montana's privacy laws forbid it from telling other states that, in fact, Weston had been ordered into a mental institution for a 90-day evaluation in 1996.

"The mental health laws in Montana are very strict, and they do not share those types of commitments with law enforcement in Montana, or with ourselves, obviously. So any checks we ran - which we did in Montana - came out negative," he said.

It happens all the time, say lawmen. Committment to a mental institution means automatic denial of a gun permit. However, states rarely tell each other about such records.

Weston spent 53 days locked up in a mental hospital, and from all accounts, should not have been released.