In the wake of the Northern Illinois University shooting, state lawmakers are pushing for legislation to aid the federal government in keeping guns away from people with histories of mental health issues.

Wisconsin legislators are moving forward with a bill that would require the state to give mental health information on residents who aren’t allowed to own guns to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, according to a Feb. 27 article in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Wisconsin is one of 18 states in the nation that does not currently provide this information to the federal database. Federal law prohibits people who have been involuntarily admitted into mental health care centers to purchase firearms, according to the article.

It is high time for Wisconsin to join most of the United States in giving this information to the federal government. By not providing this information, the state created a potential opportunity for people with past mental health issues who want to purchase guns. If their names did not show up on the database because the state withheld that information, they could have possibly gotten their hands on a gun.

Obviously, the federal government needs to make sure this database is not made public. Background checks should be the only place this mental health information is made available to avoid instances of unnecessary discrimination to the people in this database.

Still, this is a great first step in keeping firearms out of the hands of the unstable. But to make this federal database truly effective, the 17 remaining states that don’t provide this information to the federal government need to do so as well. Having an incomplete list of people with past mental health issues is still going to leave open the chance of those individuals obtaining firearms and potentially repeating the violence the country witnessed at NIU or Virginia Tech last year.