Error Limits Gun Buyer Checks : Firearms: Assemblyman vows to amend law intended to encourage people to seek mental help by not forbidding them to buy weapons. A widow says the measure allowed her husband to kill himself.

A new law protecting the right of psychiatric patients to own firearms has inadvertently limited background checks on gun buyers who have been locked up as dangerous mental patients, according to the state Department of Justice.

“That was not our intention,” said Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Arcata), who wrote the law and said he will seek new legislation to remedy the problem.

The law, which went into effect last year, was aimed at preventing voluntary mental patients from losing the right to buy handguns after successful treatment.

But the legislation unintentionally lifted the Department of Justice’s authority to check back five years to see if a prospective gun buyer had been committed to a mental institution as a danger to himself or others, according to Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul V. Bishop, an expert on firearms law.

State officials are now limited to asking mental hospitals for records of involuntary commitments that have occurred since Jan. 1, 1991, even though state law prohibits dangerous patients from owning handguns for five years after release from custody, Bishop said.

There are more than 100,000 such involuntary commitments each year in California.

No one knows how many, if any, of the people who were involuntarily committed to mental hospitals from 1988 to 1990 have bought guns. But the Department of Justice system for checking such commitments occurring since 1991 has prevented 275 firearms transactions involving former mental patients who had been declared a danger to themselves or others during the last 2 1/2 years, officials said.

Critics say that Department of Justice officials have been lax in checking mental commitment records of gun buyers even when the law clearly gives them broader authority. A wrongful death suit in Alameda County blames the Department of Justice for failure to make a background check that would have prevented a suicidal mental patient from buying a handgun that he used to kill himself in 1991.

Joseph A. Braman walked into Siegle’s Hunting and Fishing Headquarters in Oakland on Feb. 13, 1991, and picked out a cheap, Brazilian-made Rossi .38-caliber revolver. Under state law, Braman had to wait 15 days before taking possession of the gun while his application for purchase was sent to the Department of Justice for a records check to determine if he had been convicted of a felony or had a history of mental illness.

Braman, 26, had no criminal record, but the previous fall he had been involuntarily committed twice to mental institutions as a danger to himself or others, and that winter had attempted suicide with an overdose of prescription medication.

On Jan. 1, 1991, new state laws authorized the Department of Justice to request such records from the previous five years from mental hospitals.

Until then, the records were deemed confidential, according to Bishop of the attorney general’s office.

But even after passage of the law, the Department of Justice was simply authorized--and not mandated--to check mental commitment records, Bishop said, and there was no system for gathering the records. As a result, he said, the department concentrated on collecting records of new commitments, and even those results were spotty.

Braman’s commitments in 1990 were not reported to the Department of Justice. On Feb. 28 he went back to Siegle’s and picked up the Rossi revolver.

Three days later, Braman was sitting in the bedroom of his Oakland home with his wife, Michele, who is blind. The couple were making out a grocery shopping list and Braman, who had just taken a shower, got up and went into the bathroom.

Michele Braman heard what she thought was a car backfire. Then she heard what sounded like water splashing against the shower curtain and wondered why Braman was bathing again.

“And then I thought I smelled gunpowder,” she said. “Because I don’t see, my other senses are so acutely developed that I hear and smell and sense things to a great degree.

“I screamed for him and I ran into the bathroom.”

Braman was slumped over the bathtub as blood from his head sprayed against the shower curtain.

Michele Braman is seeking $7.3 million in damages from the Department of Justice for its failure to check her husband’s commitment records. The state won the first round of the suit last year when it convinced an Alameda Superior Court judge that the Justice Department’s authority to check such mental commitment records is legally discretionary, not mandatory.

Ronald J. Palmeri, the attorney for Michele Braman, is appealing the decision, arguing that “it is a sad statement by the office of the attorney general that the Department of Justice has no duty and no corresponding liability to implement a law intended to protect not only Mrs. Braman, but her deceased husband.”

At the time of Braman’s death, the Justice Department was setting up a process for checking involuntary commitment records going back five years. But on Jan. 1, 1992, Assemblyman Hauser’s legislation became law.

As Bishop interprets the thicket of gun laws, Hauser’s new statute removed the Department of Justice’s authority to seek records of former mental patients going back five years and requires the reporting only of commitments since Jan. 1, 1991.

“I may have to go back and correct that,” Hauser said. “We were not trying to open the door.

“We were trying to encourage people to seek help,” he said, “and we didn’t want to put the potential loss of the ability to purchase a firearm (as a deterrent) to seeking mental health support.”

In 1991, the Department of Justice received records of about 152,000 involuntary commitments to mental hospitals involving people deemed a danger to themselves or others.

These records are computerized, along with felony records. When Department of Justice officials receive a firearms purchase application--which gun dealers are required to submit--the name of the applicant is run through the computer.

In 1991, such routine checks prevented 80 sales of guns to former mental patients who had been involuntarily committed as a danger to themselves or others.

Last year, records of about 100,000 more such commitments were added to the state files. Nearly 200 gun sales to dangerous mental patients were stopped that year.

But if Braman were alive today, he could walk into Siegle’s, fill out a purchase order for a gun and pick it up in 15 days. Because of the inadvertent change in the law, the Department of Justice still has no record of his commitment in 1990--nor that of anyone else who was deemed a dangerous mental patient that year. Nor in 1989. Nor in 1988.