Canada would have stopped Cho...

A critic of the VA Tech Report, has the solution:

The federal form asked Cho whether he had an adjudicated condition, meaning a court ruling declaring him mentally defective or committing him to an institution. Presumably that could be checked...

The Canadian system is different, and better. Presumably the gun registration system was costly because it is admirably meticulous. Among many personal questions, it asks the buyer, crucially, whether he has suffered from depression, alcohol, drug or substance abuse, behavioural problems or emotional problems in the past five years.

In other words, they don't merely seek an adjudicated illness, where a court or mental hospital has dealt with the illness. They ask whether you have these problems, even if you had the cunning to avoid the legal or medical establishment noticing it.

I'm proud that Canada does this...

First she acknowledges that Cho may have lied on his form, but then she claims that with this new Canadian question, Cho would have told the truth. Oh there's more:

Cho's menace was apparent to almost everyone. And if he had walked into a gun shop in Canada, the shop owner would have been legally compelled to notice that the guy in front of him in the reflective glasses had long ago driven round the bend and right over the edge.

Another layer of Canada's superior gun control: the shop owners, who by virtue of being Canadian are vastly more skilled in the art of detecting would be murderers. After all, they are legally compelled to judge a person's sanity by their appearance.

I haven't seen such condescending nationalist snobbery in a long while. But rest assured, if we are to stop the next Cho, we must not only strive for that extra truth-inducing question on the forms, but we Americans must work hard to achieve Canadian skill-level in judgment.

(I'm not saying the article implied Canadian superiority in judging a person's sanity over Americans; I am saying such is the assumption in Canadian law, comparatively. In Canada if you have the appearance of being less than sane, your inalienable right to arms rests upon the whim of a shop owner. Power over another on subjective terms mandated by law.)