THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But that is a rather extreme method of reducing the mentally ill. They would be much less threatening if they didn't have access to as much weaponry as they desire. And waiting for the good guys with guns to stop them is straight out of Cloud Cuckoo Land. So shouldn't there be some way of empowering the local sheriffs and police chiefs to get access to information about who isn't too tightly wrapped to control their access to deadly weapons?

Before issuing thousands of permits each year for North Carolinians to buy handguns, sheriffs in Mecklenburg, Union and some other counties across the state have gone through an oft-futile exercise.

Relying on statutory language allowing them to ensure each gun owner is of “good moral character,” they have submitted applicants’ names to large health care facilities seeking to learn whether anyone was suicidal or otherwise mentally unfit to own a pistol.

Under the 1968 federal Gun Control Act, the sheriffs’ offices are entitled to know whether an applicant is disqualified from owning a firearm because he or she has been found by a court to be mentally ill, unable to manage his own affairs or a danger to himself and others.

But except for those seeking concealed carry permits, who have long been required to release their mental health information, sheriffs say the door has almost always slammed shut on disclosure of any further information.

For years, most requests for mental health information have been caught in a legal stalemate between law enforcement needs and health facilities’ concerns about patients’ privacy – a conflict that’s a key part of the national debate over how to stem a seemingly endless spate of mass killings.

Recurring scenarios of heavily armed men, some possibly psychotic, firing randomly at defenseless children in Newtown, Connecticut, nursing home patients in Carthage, North Carolina., or parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church have left everyone from President Barack Obama to local cops grasping for answers. A number of the shooters in scores of mass killings had mental health problems, but still were able to legally buy guns.

Addressing the obstacles to keeping firearms away from mentally troubled people has emerged as an area of potential common ground among some stakeholders in the hard-bitten debate over gun control.

However, any attempt at compromises is sure to be complicated by thorny legal, ethical and political questions over how to balance mental health patients’ privacy, Americans’ Second Amendment rights to bear arms and the need to keep guns away from those posing a clear danger.

“We must continue to protect privacy,” said Republican Rep. Robert Pittenger of North Carolina, who wants to draft bi-partisan legislation to improve the flow of information. “But there should also be enough room for law enforcement to be alerted to specific concerns about those with mental illness and have the opportunity to investigate and determine if further action is necessary.”

The National Rifle Association, the nation’s leading gun rights group, could be one one obstacle. It takes the position that there must be “a formal process before stripping a person of a constitutional right” to own a gun, spokeswoman Amy Hunter said in a statement.

Is it any surprise that the NRA is standing up against public safety because that next gun sale is more important than someone's life.