The BBC calls it a loophole. But at the end of the day a control on who can purchase a firearm is just that, and a really good idea:

An existing loophole meant Cho was not entered onto the database even when a Virginia judge ruled he was a danger to himself, because he was treated as an outpatient and never committed to hospital.

The Virginia State Police have now been directed to request copies of orders both for involuntary inpatient and involuntary outpatient care from district courts.

Of course, it still begs the question of how the federal controls play into things, as the NYT pointed out earlier:

Under federal law, the Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment, a state official and several legal experts said Friday.

This apparently doesn’t phase the anti-regulation radicals who propound the theory that controls don’t stop crimes.

But Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine says gun-control laws “disarm the law-abiding people, but they leave the criminals free to attack their victims who have no defense.”

“It’s never been never demonstrated in any conclusive way that gun control reduces crime,” he said.

Sad that CNN would choose a radical for perspective on the subject and leave such nonsense unanswered. The reason he said “in any conclusive way” is surely so he can control the debate on what is conclusive. Tricky.

Sullum wants you to believe that not enough guns are flowing through the halls of Virginia educational institutions. Here is his latest diatribe:

In shootings at other schools, armed students or employees have restrained gunmen, possibly preventing additional murders. Four years ago at Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia, a man who had killed the dean, a professor, and a student was subdued by two students who ran to their cars and grabbed their guns. In 1997 an assistant principal at a public high school in Pearl, Mississippi, likewise retrieved a handgun from his car and used it to apprehend a student who had killed three people.

Utter nonsense. That contradicts his own analysis of the Cho incident, as presented in the prior paragraph in the same story:

If some students and faculty members had access to guns during the attack, there’s a good chance they could have cut it short. According to witnesses, the killer—identified by police as Cho Seung-Hui, a senior studying English—took his time and paused repeatedly for a minute or so to reload.

Paused for a minute or so while completing 100 rounds? Who could run to a truck and get a weapon in that time? The only thing that saved people was running and jumping to escape. That’s it. For Gullum’s theory to work, the classrooms would have to be filled with arms. Do you think a teacher would agree to teach in such an environment? Give an F, get a bullet? Or should the teacher be packing more heat than the students combined in order to enforce their position?

Cho clearly had planned to take out as many people as possible in a very short time by using a machine pistol (mpg of the Glock 18 here) with recently legalized large clips of ammunition. He checked the rooms before he attacked them and his planning indicated he would have anticipated a firefight if he had needed to, just like the heavily armored bank robbers have done in Los Angeles.

Wearing body armor and carrying a trunk full of weapons, the robbers were ready for a fight. And that’s exactly what they delivered, firing “multiple hundreds” of rounds, according to police.

Similar to the LA tragedy, what really happened was an awful mismatch between an armed and irrational assailant and a group that did not realize they were suddenly at risk from significant control gaps in their shared environment.

Citizens should not be tasked to individually close control gaps through expensive and dangerous weapons and training of their own any more than they should have to individually become masters of a subject through self-study instead of attending an educational institution.

Aside from the economics of distributed systems, rational and reasonable behavior is what people agree to in an organization, through negotiation of terms such as “unstable”, followed by controls to detect and prevent vulnerabilities and threats.

Saying that everyone should be on constant guard for every other person’s interpretation of what is right and wrong is a recipe for escalation into disaster. The Bush administration’s security policy in Iraq is a shining example of this as they flattened the existing control system and replaced it with an every-man-for-himself situation under the mistaken belief that their vision would easily dominate the vacuum through economic and military muscle. The last thing Virginia needs is a similarly flawed model to actually incite armed confrontation in the classroom as a means of settling disputes.