Cantor: Virgina background check system should serve as national model

week suggested that Virginia’s background check system could potentially serve as a national model due to it’s mental health adjudications. The state’s two Democratic Senators, Sen. Tim Kain and Sen. Mark R. Warner, agreed with him. “There are many aspects of the Virginia background check system that are superb,” Sen. Tim Kaine said last week after a joint event with Sen. Mark R. Warner in Northern Virginia. “We are the best state in the country in introducing mental health adjudications into the national database. Nineteen states don’t put any mental health adjudications into the national database, and some states just do a few here and there, but Virginia’s the best state in the country in doing that, so there are aspects of the way we do the background check system in Virginia that really are a national model.” “I think that we can take a lot of lessons from what Virginia did and put it in place at the federal level, because there are a lot of states that aren’t doing what Virginia is doing to try and beef up the database for the background checks to make sure that we actually can do something that does have a chance at reducing the likelihood and hopefully eliminating it from happening again,” said Cantor. A lot of this simply boils down, once again, to firearm background screening. Cantor had said the week previous that he favored improving any national background check systems used to evaluate gun purchase applications, although he stopped short of calling for expanding background checks to all firearms sales. A poll released last month by CNN showed that 94 percent of adults favored background checks for all gun purchases.    ]]>