People diagnosed with mental illness could have an easier time buying guns in New Mexico because the state doesn't report them to a national gun registry.

According to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, New Mexico is one of 10 states that has never sent any mental-health data to the National Instant Background Check System, or NICS.

That's because there's no law requiring the state to do so, according to a state police spokesman. In fact, he said, New Mexico doesn't even have a criteria for determining if a person should be disqualified from owning a gun due to mental illness.

"Federal law prohibits any person from selling or otherwise transferring a firearm or ammunition to any person who has been 'adjudicated as a mental defective' or 'committed to any mental institution,' " said Lt. Eric Garcia, public-information officer for the New Mexico State Police. But "no law requires states to report the identities of these individuals" to NICS.

The federal law banning firearms sales to people declared mentally defective or committed to a mental institution has been on the books since 1968.

In 1993, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act — named for President Ronald Reagan's press secretary, James Brady, who was shot in the head during an attack on the president on March 30, 1981 — amended the law to require state law-enforcement officials to report mentally defective individuals to a national database that gun dealers can check before completing a sale. But the U.S. Supreme Court declared that provision unconstitutional in 1997.

In 2008, then-President George W. Bush signed legislation aimed at preventing the mentally ill from buying guns, but Congress never appropriated funds to enforce the law.

Two years ago, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence pointed out that New Mexico had not submitted any data to the NICS on people judged mentally ill. At the time, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety said statutory authority is needed to provide those records. He said department officials would seek to have the 2010 Legislature provide that authority. But no such proposal was made that year or, so far, this year, according to a spokesman for the Legislative Council Service.

The Mayors Against Illegal Guns organization recently said the lack of adequate reporting of the mentally ill to the NICS was responsible, in part, for allowing Seung-Hui Cho to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech in April 2007. He purchased weapons a month earlier, despite a judge's finding he was "an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness" in 2005. Virginia subsequently changed its laws and now reports more mental-illness cases to NICS than any other state.

The organization said the flaw also contributed to Jared Lee Loughner allegedly killing six people and injuring 14 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., on Jan. 8 at a Tucson strip mall. He reportedly used gun he bought less than a year after he was rejected from enlisting in the Army. Loughner was never adjudicated as mentally ill or committed to a mental institution, but Pima Community College had banned him from campus until he sought care from a psychologist and was deemed stable enough to return to school.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.