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By PAUL CARRIER
Blethen Maine Newspapers Monday, July 2, 2007

State officials say the bill had to be withdrawn at the last minute because it would have conflicted with existing and proposed federal laws, possibly jeopardizing public-safety funding from the federal government.

The bill was supposed to make it harder for people to buy guns if a court has found them to be mentally ill, by feeding more information into the federal system that licensed gun dealers use to run background checks.

Federal law bars people from buying firearms if they have been adjudicated as mentally ill, but the states have leeway in deciding how much case information they provide to the federal system. Most states, including Maine, withhold some information.

The issue adopted a high profile in Maine and across the nation after Seung-Hui Cho, who had been ordered to undergo psychiatric counseling, shot and killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute on April 16.

The Maine Department of Public Safety notifies the FBI when someone is found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity in a criminal proceeding. Maine, however, does not forward information from civil proceedings in which courts commit mentally ill people to a mental hospital against their will.

The bill filed by House Majority Whip Sean Faircloth, D-Bangor, tried to close that gap by requiring that the state give the FBI data about mentally ill people who are hospitalized involuntarily after a court hearing.

As amended by a legislative committee, the bill would have disclosed commitments of people who, in the words of the bill, "present a likelihood of serious harm" to themselves or others, even if they have not committed a crime.

The House of Representatives passed the bill June 14, and the Senate followed suit the next day. That set the stage for Gov. John Baldacci, who previously had endorsed the bill, to sign it into law. But on June 21, the last day of the 2007 legislative session, both branches of the Legislature recalled the bill from the governor's desk before he could sign it.

Recalling a bill that has been passed but not signed is unusual but not unprecedented. This year, three of the roughly 650 bills passed by the Legislature were recalled, including this one.

Bills can be recalled if the Legislature changes its mind on an issue, or if technical problems come to light that need to be fixed before a bill becomes law.

The late recall of LD 1902, as the gun-control bill was called, went largely unnoticed at the time because it was overshadowed by other end-of-session votes, including the collapse of a tax-reform plan.

William Harwood of Maine Citizens Against Handgun Violence criticized the decision Friday, saying the Legislature passed up a chance to make Maine safer by keeping guns out of the hands of people who are too dangerous to have them.

"We have created a culture here in which there is so much anxiety and concern about doing too much to regulate guns that we do nothing," Harwood said.

Conceding that the bill may need to be fine-tuned later, Harwood said the Legislature "missed an important opportunity to improve our laws" simply because the bill may not have been perfect.

"Most of what goes through (the Legislature) is half a loaf," which is better than nothing at all, Harwood said.

If a mentally ill person commits "a Virginia Tech-type shooting" here after having been committed to a mental hospital, Harwood said, "somebody is going to have to explain why LD 1902 was not enacted."

Democratic Sen. Bill Diamond of Windham, who pushed to recall the bill, and state Public Safety Commissioner Anne Jordan, who supported that move, said the bill was too badly flawed to put it on the books.

Diamond said he still supports the concept of the bill. Jordan, who works for Baldacci, said the governor does, too.

Jordan noted that the bill would have allowed her to restore a mentally ill person's right to own a gun after hospitalization, but federal law says only the U.S. attorney general can make such a decision.

Jordan said a proposed federal law passed by the U.S. House would allow states to restore gun rights to mentally ill people, but she said the bill recalled by the Legislature would have conflicted with the pending federal legislation, too, by failing to provide a state appeal process in such cases.

The U.S. House passed the federal revisions, which threaten the loss of public-safety funds for noncompliance with federal reporting requirements, after a Maine legislative committee embraced the Maine bill and sent it to the full Legislature, according to Jordan.

"We didn't have those cautionary notes thrown at us" until late in the legislative session, Diamond said. "Had we heard this same message (sooner), obviously the bill wouldn't have gotten as far as it did."

The Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, which Diamond co-chairs, plans to rework the bill before the 2008 legislative session.

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