Crazy people shouldn't buy gubs

The New York Times has (yet again) an editorial decrying the poor paperwork on gub purchases:

The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre, Seung-Hui Cho, should never have been allowed to buy the weapons he used in the 2007 rampage. He had been found mentally ill and ordered into treatment by a court, yet that record never made it into the database of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System used for screening prospective gun purchasers.
Prompted by that tragedy, Congress approved a law, signed by President Bush in 2008, authorizing new grant money and penalties to encourage states to submit to the federal system pertinent records regarding individuals judged to be severely mentally ill, as well as others barred from buying or possessing firearms, including convicted felons and drug abusers. Although more records are in the system now, the results are still distressingly deficient.
As of April, six states— Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island— had not submitted a single mental health record to the gun check system, according to a new report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group led by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Nineteen more states and the District of Columbia had submitted fewer than one hundred mental health records apiece. Many federal agencies also lag in submitting relevant records to the system.
Meanwhile, the 2008 law is having an unfortunate side effect. In exchange for its help in passing the bill, the National Rifle Association insisted that, to qualify for grants to help improve their record sharing, states must establish “a relief from disability” program that would allow people with histories of disqualifying mental health problems to apply to have their gun rights restored.
The result, as Michael Luo reported recently in The Times, has been a proliferation of new restoration laws, many with extremely lax standards, adopted at the NRA’s behest, for determining whether a petitioner can be trusted to handle guns. Too often judges, lacking expertise in the area, make decisions without reviewing important evidence about an applicant’s mental health, sometimes after only a brief hearing, or no hearing at all.
President Obama was on the right track two months after the mass killing in Tucson when, in an op-ed article in The Arizona Daily Star, he pointed to the missing state records and the need for an “instant, accurate, comprehensive” background check system. That would require ending the gun show loophole and other exceptions that allow dangerous individuals to avoid background checks.
The President, however, has failed to follow up with a strong bureaucratic effort to overcome the technological challenges, the privacy concerns, and the inattention of state officials who maintain mental health and other underreported records. Nor has he thrown his weight behind a promising measure, sponsored by two New York Democrats, Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Carolyn McCarthy. Their legislation would impose tougher monetary penalties on states that do not submit required reports to the national background check system. It would also extend the background check requirement to all gun sales, including those at gun shows. Four years after Virginia Tech and six months after Tucson, presidential leadership is still missing.