DaytonDailyNews.com

KETTERING — — The murder of 32 people at the hands of a mentally disturbed Virginia Tech student is a tragedy that resonates with Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who was a practicing psychologist prior to being elected to Congress in 1992.

For Strickland, it raises troubling questions about how mental illness is addressed in a country where care is expensive and it is difficult to force someone to get treatment.

Strickland said the Virginia tragedy reminded him of a troubled young man he treated during his early 1980s tenure as a psychologist at Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital in Columbus.

The young man had been discharged from the hospital. He brought Strickland drawings of guns and knives and suffered from paranoia so severe he would walk with his back against walls "looking for snipers," Strickland said.

One day he held a knife to Strickland's chest and described in detail how he could stab him, take him to the river and cut him up.

"I said, 'I'm going to trust you not to do that,'?" Strickland said.

The man put away the knife.

Eventually he quit coming to Strickland's office, so every few weeks Strickland would visit the man's apartment to check on him. After the man moved away, Strickland got a call from him because he was in trouble with police after pulling a gun on a store customer he thought was going to rob the place.

Strickland said he can only hope that the things he did to help that young man kept something more terrible from happening.

While Strickland believes dangerous mentally disturbed people should not have access to guns, he does not believe the Virginia Tech case means Ohio's gun laws need strengthened. Not everyone with mental issues is dangerous, he said.

The state has no waiting period to buy guns, but a background check through the FBI is required and guns cannot be sold to certain people, said John Fulkerson, section chief for Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann.

Licensed gun dealers are prohibited from selling guns to persons who have felony, stalking or domestic violence convictions; have received dishonorable discharges; are fugitives, noncitizens, or drug addicts or who have been committed by a court to a mental institution.