Some who have mental issue hold gun license

Some Ohioans permitted to carry concealed weapons shouldn’t be, state Attorney General Dave Yost said Tuesday.

In a review of the system, Yost discovered 41 people who are mentally incompetent and therefore shouldn’t have concealed-carry licenses. That is out of the roughly 700,000 active license holders.

“Those 41 individuals represent only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the Ohioans who have concealed-carry licenses, and we are not aware that any harmful outcomes have resulted,” Yost said. “But even one unlawful license is too many.”

Yost said he is instructing county sheriffs to revoke the licenses and make sure the holders are notified.

The counties with the highest number of active license holders deemed mentally incompetent are Montgomery, with eight, and Franklin, Hamilton and Clermont, with five each.

Of the 41 license holders, 35 were declared mentally incompetent after they obtained a license, and the six others were known to be mentally incompetent before they obtained one.

Marc Gofstein, spokesman for the Franklin County sheriff's office, said all five license holders in the county will receive notices in the mail.

Yost’s report found two weaknesses in the system: courts and mental health providers are not notifying his Bureau of Criminal Investigation promptly about the declarations of mental incompetence; and “bureaucratic roadblocks” result because separate entities maintain databases of those declared mentally incompetent and those with concealed-carry licenses.

To fix the system, Yost said in a news release, BCI and the Ohio Department of Public Safety are working to automate cross-checking of the database to permanently allow updates to flow to BCI. This is what led to the discovery of the 41 mentally incompetent people.

Jim Irvine, an Ohio gun-rights activist, said he agreed with Yost’s decision to review the system and fix the issues he found.

“What he found is that the system works incredibly well and works 99.99% of the time, but what I also see here is that it’s not perfect,” Irvine said.

Toby Hoover, the founder and former director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, said further reforms are needed because license holders aren’t screened every time they apply, and the system is bound is miss anyone who isn’t declared mentally incompetent by a court or mental health provider.

The application to obtain a concealed-carry license does ask applicants a series of yes or no questions asking whether they have been adjudicated or committed for being mentally incompetent or defective.

Hoover said she is happy that the attorney general is making improvements, but she also suspects that some people choose not to tell the truth on their applications and can slip by without getting a real background check of their mental health.

“Any improvement is a good thing, and we certainly need to make sure people who shouldn’t have a license don’t have one,” Hoover said. gshillcock@dispatch.com @Shillcockgeorge