No red flag on La. shooter

COLUMBUS, Ga. - The man who killed two people in a Lafayette, La., movie theater last week was able to legally purchase a gun despite a judge's order sending him to a Georgia hospital for mental health treatment in 2008 because he was never involuntarily committed, a county probate judge told the Washington Post Monday.

"If he had been adjudicated in need of involuntary treatment, I would have reported that to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who would then send it to the FBI," said Muscogee County Probate Judge Marc E. D'Antonio, who was the county's chief clerk at the time. "I clearly would have known. That did not happen."

An involuntary commitment would have forever banned John Houser from buying a gun under the sweeping federal gun law that passed after the Virginia Tech mass shooting in 2007. But Houser never reached the crucial stage of having a judge rule on his mental competence, D'Antonio said.

Contrary to legal filings by Houser's family, Carroll County Probate Judge Betty Cason told the Associated Press that she did not order Houser to be involuntarily committed for mental health treatment at the West Central Regional Hospital in Columbus, Ga., which is in Muscogee County, where she lacks jurisdiction.

As a result, Houser's purchase of a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun at a Phenix City, Ala., pawn shop last year was perfectly legal, setting up the tragedy in Louisiana, and exposing what gun control advocates say is a troubling loophole in the federal law that governs who may legally acquire firearms.

Houser's brush with institutionalization began in the spring of 2008, when he showed up unannounced in Carrollton, Ga., and barged into his daughter's office to angrily object to her upcoming wedding.

It was an ominous and threatening scene, the family's attorney said later in a court petition - the latest example of Houser's "volatile mental state." Cason signed what was known as an "order to apprehend" Houser, and sheriff's deputies took him to a the hospital in Columbus, according to court papers.

Following standard procedure in Georgia, doctors could have evaluated and examined Houser for up to a week before making the key decision about what to do with him. At that point, they could either release him, persuade him to be admitted by his own agreement or petition a local probate court judge to involuntarily commit him for treatment - a formal judgment called an adjudication.

Neither a release nor a voluntary stay in the hospital would have resulted in Houser's hospitalization being reported up the chain to state authorities and then to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System federal database, according to interviews with both law enforcement officials and legal experts in Georgia.

A spokesman for the state hospital system and a spokeswoman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told the Washington Post that they were working to provide answers about Houser's case.