NEW YORK - A revamping of laws to require stricter background checks on would-be gun purchasers is needed to prevent more calamities such as the Virginia Tech campus massacre that cost 32 lives, two New York lawmakers said Sunday.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., said it went beyond reason that Seung-Hui Cho had been able to buy two handguns legally in Virginia despite having been identified as a mentally ill person who had frightened fellow students and faculty members with his anti-social behavior and violence-themed writings.

The legislators, longtime advocates on Capitol Hill for tighter gun control, said they would jointly introduce legislation to guarantee that all prospective gun buyers are checked against the federal government's National Instant Criminal System, a computerized method for checking various databases for mental health records.

“It is long past overdue that we revamp our gun laws, and prevent dangerous people from slipping through the cracks in the system,” Schumer said.

McCarthy, who was elected to Congress after her husband was killed and her son wounded by a gunman on a Long Island Rail Road commuter trail in 1993, said the legislation would provide funding and “huge incentives” for states and local governments to close loopholes in their laws concerning delivery of mental health data for federal gun background checks.

Although federal law requiring background checks for prospective gun buyers stipulates that anyone “adjudicated mentally defective” or who has been committed to a mental institution cannot purchase a firearm, the law is erratically applied, Schumer said.

He said many such records are not in the NICS because state and local governments lack the money to submit them, and in some states there is no legal requirement to do so. “As a result, many people who simply should not have guns are allowed to purchase them,” he said.

In Virginia, which has relatively lenient gun laws, Cho's mental health records were not submitted and he easily passed background checks for the store purchase of a Glock 9-millimeter gun and a .22 caliber pistol bought on the Internet, Schumer said.

The proposed legislation would provide $250 million to state agencies and $125 million to state courts to upgrade their procedures for making sure such information is forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and require federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to also submit such records to the database.

States that don't comply would risk losing 5 percent of federal funding under the 1968 Crime and Safe Streets Act.

AP-ES-04-22-07 1416EDT