SFGate - How laws can head off mass shootings: California cited as model

Deadly mass shootings occur with such alarming regularity that the public can be forgiven for believing there's no way to prevent them.

But lawmakers and experts concerned with the connections between mental illness and violence insist that solutions exist.

And, they say, many of them can be found in California, where laws on the books are credited with reducing the gun death rate 56 percent in the past two decades, according to data compiled by San Francisco's Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

On a national level, expanded gun-purchase background checks - the most prominent proposal put forward in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School rampage in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 - failed in the Senate last year under lobbying by the National Rifle Association. Efforts to revive the measure are unlikely in an election year.

Nevertheless, given the fact that many mass shooters have backstories in common - young, troubled men who slip through cracks in the mental health care system - some experts say there are ways to pinpoint potential killers before they start pulling triggers.

"You're never going to get to zero, which is too bad, but that's the society we live in," said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. "There are no easy solutions. It's like a jigsaw puzzle; no one piece solves everything, but multiple pieces put together can make a difference."

Several of the ideas are embodied in legislative proposals now before Congress.

-- Gun-violence restraining orders.

Modeled on domestic-violence restraining orders, the gun-violence order passed a California state Senate committee last week. It would permit family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily remove guns from someone suffering a mental crisis. A similar law in Connecticut resulted in seizures of 2,000 guns based on 277 warrants between 1999 and 2009, according to one study.

On Capitol Hill, California Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, a gun owner who chairs the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, introduced a measure that would permit police to obtain gun-removal warrants from judges. The owners would have a right to a hearing within two weeks to determine if police could continue to hold the weapons.

"If law enforcement had the ability to remove firearms from someone who is a danger to themselves or others, it would go a long way toward defusing some of these problems," Thompson said.

"In California, it would have worked well in the Elliot Rodger situation," Thompson said, referring to the 22-year-old who killed six people and himself near UC Santa Barbara on May 23.

Police had checked on Rodger on April 30 at the behest of his parents, but he convinced them he was fine. Without the law, Thompson said, police had no incentive to check and discover that Rodger owned at least two handguns and magazines loaded with over 400 rounds of ammunition.

The NRA has called on its 5 million-plus members to oppose the Thompson bill, calling it a variation on measures being pursued by "the likes of (former New York Mayor) Michael Bloomberg and his 'Everytown' gun-control cabal."

-- Assisted outpatient treatment.

AOT, as it's known in the mental-health world, would expand judges' power to enforce treatment for people with mental illness. It's on the books in 45 states, but only a few have effective enforcement mechanisms and dollars available for social services to help those ordered into treatment.

"AOT is a euphemism, invented to make it seem less draconian," said Jeff Swanson, a psychiatry professor at Duke University who is one of the nation's leading experts on mental illness and violence. "It's a treatment plan wrapped inside a judicial order."

California has a form of it, Laura's Law, but relies on counties to set up enforcement structures. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors is on the verge of passing it.

Many mental health advocates fear that AOT expansion would take the health care system back to the 1950s, when mental patients were warehoused in institutions that had a total of 500,000 beds. Since deinstitutionalization in the 1960s and '70s, the number has dropped to around 50,000.

"We think (AOT) runs the risk of unintended consequences and moving us backward," said John Head, communications director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. "No one would say they want to go back to that, but we say look, see if what you're proposing points us in that direction. If it does, we're concerned about it."

Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., a clinical psychologist and author of legislation that would dramatically expand AOT, said fear of turning back the clock is a "false argument."

"It's not apples and oranges; it's apples and bricks," he said.

Murphy's legislation also would lower health care privacy bars that prevent families from involvement in loved ones' treatment, and lower the threshold for treatment.

-- Barring those with violent-misdemeanor convictions from buying or possessing guns - something California has done since 1991.

Current federal law bars only those convicted of felonies from owning guns. Under this proposal, the bar would be lowered to anyone convicted of violent misdemeanors.

Experts say this change would keep guns out of the hands of potential mass shooters who do not necessarily suffer from diagnosable mental illness.

"It's not just mental illness in and of itself," said Garen Wintemute, an emergency room physician at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento and director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program. A history of violent behavior combined with drug or alcohol abuse often points at troubles to come, he said.

"The more of those factors you have, the greater is your risk for violence in the future," Wintemute said.