Sen. Kyrsten Sinema voted to limit background check reporting hours before Maine shootings

An Army reservist, who has reportedly shown symptoms of mental health issues in recent months, allegedly shot and killed 18 people Wednesday in Lewiston, Maine.

Earlier that day, the U.S. Senate voted to approve a Republican-led amendment that would limit the Department of Veterans Affairs’ ability to relay information about some veterans, including those with certain mental health issues, to an FBI database used for gun background checks.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., was one of only five non-Republican senators to vote in favor of the measure.

According to the bill’s sponsor, the VA is required to report people to the FBI’s criminal background check system whenever a fiduciary is appointed to help the person manage their VA benefits.

The Senate-approved amendment would prohibit the VA from relaying that information to the database, unless a judge rules that the person poses a danger to themselves or others.

Timeline: Deadly mass shooting in Maine as police search for suspect Robert Card

A spokesperson for Sinema defended her vote, noting that the amendment would not change federal requirements for background checks, and is geared toward limiting the VA’s role in determining whether a person is mentally fit to own a gun.

“Kyrsten voted to ensure a judge — not a bureaucrat at the VA — was responsible to determine whether a veteran was a danger to themselves or others, just as judges make that determination for civilians,” the spokesperson wrote.

Research suggests that most mass murders are not committed by severely mentally ill people, and that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it.

The suspect in the mass shooting, Robert Card, was committed to a mental health facility for two weeks over the summer because he was “hearing voices” and threatening to shoot up a military base in Saco, Maine, severalnews outlets have reported.

It is not immediately clear whether the amendment would have applied directly to Card. Jaclyn Schildkraut, a gun policy expert with the Rockefeller Institute of Government, noted that only certain specific criteria in federal law limit people's right to have a gun, such as a person being deemed, as the law puts it, a “mental defective” or being committed to a mental institution, rather than going to one voluntarily.

A VA spokesperson said they could not say for sure whether Card fell into those categories and said that Card used VA education benefits in 2004, but he has not used or applied for any VA benefits since.

“Effectively it is too early to determine whether this bill would have any relevance to the Maine shooting as there are just a lot of unknowns,” wrote Schildkraut, the gun policy expert, in an email to the Arizona Republic.

Asked on Friday about Sinema’s vote, Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who is running for the Senate seat she currently holds, said that he would have voted against the measure.

“Our criminal background system is very important. It’s one of the few things that does work to stop people that shouldn’t be owning weapons (from) buying weapons. And anything that diminishes that, I think, is not going to keep Americans safe,” Gallego said Friday at a news conference on another topic.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kyrsten Sinema voted to limit background check reporting before Maine shootings