After diving deeper into this, I also learned that according to federal law, a mere diagnosis of mental illness is not enough to stop someone from buying a gun—it needs to be documented in one of the following two ways:

1. You need to be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

2. A government body, like a judge, has to declare you mentally incompetent.

Unfortunately, very few mentally ill individuals are documented in either of these ways and a many fall through the legal cracks.