The U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday passed what could become the first major federal gun control law in over a decade, spurred by the Virginia Tech campus killings and buttressed by National Rifle Association help.

The bill, which was passed on a voice vote, would improve state reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to stop gun purchases by people, including criminals and those adjudicated as mentally ill, who are prohibited from possessing firearms.

The Virginia Tech gunman, who in April killed 32 students and faculty before taking his own life, had been ordered to undergo outpatient mental health treatment and should have been barred from buying two guns he used in the rampage. But the state of Virginia had never forwarded this information to the national background check system.

A separate federal report, also released Wednesday, says that doctors, teachers and police often don't share information about potentially dangerous individuals because they fear violating complicated and overlapping privacy rules.

As a result, information that could be used to get troubled students counselling or prevent them from buying handguns never makes it to the appropriate agency, the report by three cabinet agencies said.

"People don't understand what they can share and what they can't share," said Mike Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services.

"They can, in fact, share information when a person's safety or the community's safety is, in fact, potentially in danger," Leavitt said.

Background check changes head to U.S. Senate

If it moves through the Senate and is signed into law by the president, the bill would be the most important gun control act since Congress banned some assault weapons in 1994, the last year Democrats controlled the House. In 1996, Congress added people convicted of domestic violence to the list of those banned from purchasing firearms.

Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York and a proponent of gun control legislation, said the chances of Senate passage were "very strong." He said, "When the NRA and I agree on legislation, you know that it's going to get through, become law and do some good."

The bill was the outcome of weeks of negotiations involving Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, the most senior member of the House and a strong supporter of gun rights, the NRA, and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, also a Democrat from New York and a leading gun-control advocate.

"This is good policy that will save lives," McCarthy said.

McCarthy, in an emotional speech, said that "this has been a long, long journey for me." She ran for Congress on a gun control agenda after her husband was gunned down on a Long Island commuter train in 1993.

Not a gun control bill: NRA

The NRA insisted that it was not a "gun control" bill because it does not disqualify anyone currently able to legally purchase a firearm.

The NRA has always supported the NICS, said the organization's executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre. "We've always been vigilant about protecting the rights of law-abiding citizens to purchase guns, and equally vigilant about keeping the guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally defective, and people who shouldn't have them."

Under a gun control act that passed in 1968, the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were killed, people barred from buying guns include those convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year in prison, illegal drug users, those the courts find to be mentally disabled, and illegal immigrants.

The legislation approved Wednesday would require states to automate and share disqualifying records with the FBI's NICS database. The bill also provides $250 million a year over the next three years to help states meet those goals and imposes penalties, including cuts in federal grants under an anti-crime law, to those states that fail to meet benchmarks for automating their systems and supplying information to the NICS.

Also on Wednesday, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said that in ordering state executive branch agencies to upgrade background check reporting last month he had found that Virginia was one of only 22 states reporting any mental health information to the NICS. Kaine, a Democrat, said the House bill was "significant action to honour the memories of the victims who lost their lives at Virginia Tech."

Some concessions

The NRA did win some concessions in negotiating the final product.

It would automatically restore the purchasing rights of veterans who were diagnosed with mental problems as part of the process of obtaining disability benefits. LaPierre said the Clinton administration put about 80,000 such veterans into the background check system.

It also outlines an appeals process for those who feel they have been wrongfully included in the system and ensures that funds allocated to improve the NICS are not used for other gun control purposes.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said his group supported the legislation and he hoped Congress would go a step further and extend background checks to all gun sales, not just those by licensed dealers covered by current law.

The only dissenting vote in the short House debate on the bill was voiced by presidential aspirant Ron Paul of Texas. He described the bill as "a flagrantly unconstitutional expansion of restriction on the exercise of the right to bear arms."