Republican presidential candidate and Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is calling for tougher gun laws after a man with a history of mental illness killed two and injured seven people in a movie theater in Jindal’s state.
“Every state should strengthen their laws,” Jindal said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Absolutely, in this instance, this man never should have been able to buy a gun.”
As a conservative with an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, Jindal is an unlikely candidate to call for tougher gun laws in the wake of a shooting incident.
But Jindal pointed to bills he signed into law in 2013 that mandated local courts to report changes in a person’s eligibility to buy or possess a gun, including when an individual is involuntarily committed to a hospital for mental health care, as was the case for the Lafayette movie theater shooter John Russel Houser.
“If Houser had been involuntarily committed here in Louisiana, that information would automatically — we would have reported that to the national background check system. He shouldn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to buy a gun; he wouldn’t have been able to go into that pawnshop and buy that gun, as he did in another state,” Jindal said.
Houser purchased his gun legally at a pawnshop in Alabama in 2014, six years after he had been involuntarily hospitalized due to mental health concerns in Georgia.
Alabama and Georgia were ranked among the worst at reporting mental health records to the national background check system in a 2014 report by the Everytown for Gun Safety advocacy group.
“Every time this happens it seems like the person had a history of mental illness. We need to make sure that the systems we have in place actually work,” Jindal said.