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Dignitary
 
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Post 18 Feb 2011, 8:19 am

AP reports that
More than half the states are not complying with a post-Virginia Tech law that requires them to share the names of mentally ill people with the national background-check system to prevent them from buying guns.

The new law simply requires the sharing of the names, the requirement that guns not be sold to the mentally ill dates back to 1968 and applies (922,d,4) only to someone who "has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution." According to AP, this basically means people "who have been deemed [by a judge] a danger to themselves or others, involuntarily committed or judged not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial."

You might think this would be a fairly short list. It's not easy to get any of those things done to yourself, is it? (You can read a bit about involuntary commitment in the USA HERE.) Yet among the states that have complied with the data sharing requirement, California has submitted over 250,000 names and New York and Virginia each report over 100,000. Those three states represent about 20% of the total US population. I figure that close to 1% of Americans qualify to be on this list if the reporting done by those three states is accurate. (They may be reporting lots of dead people, or people who have moved to or from other states where they'd also be reported.)

Judging by the early posting here, with the exception of radical libertarians pretty much everyone would agree that if it makes sense for Nebraska to deny ownership of a gun to someone who's been deemed by a judge to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, it makes sense for that person to be unable to cross the border to Kansas and buy a gun there. The laxity of our approach to gun ownership is illuminated by the fact that it wasn't until the Virginia Tech shooting that the sharing of these names among states became required, and the AP is reporting just how unseriously the majority of states treat this. They also report on the practical difficulties involved in complying with this reporting requirement, and on the fact that Congress has failed to authorize the promised funds to pay for the work. The Congressperson who introduced the reporting bill admits: "When we started talking to states, we learned that some of these records are kept in boxes down in some basements, so this is labor-intensive at the very least. It's going forward. I sure would like to see more states implementing this, but we're fighting for the money."

This subject can get very complicated on a philosophical level as well as a practical one. For instance, I'm sure very few states apply a statute of limitations about this, such that your name gets dropped from the list if it's been X number of years since you were last "deemed [by a judge] a danger to themselves or others, involuntarily committed or judged not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial." And it seems few states have any sort of appeals process. Is it national policy to assume that mental illness is incurable? Or at least to assume that permanent illness is more likely than cure or substantive improvement? Would such a view be supported by the facts?

It seems to me that all societies at all times have had difficulties of one sort or another with official and/or unofficial attitude toward the mentally unwell. At least in the West, so much of our culture is built around the idea (and ideal) of rationalism that being irrational, though completely unavoidable for every single one of us (to one degree or another - at one time or another), presents real conundrums and many absurdities, as well as a plethora of tragedies. The more we expect everyone to be rational, and thus grant broad liberties and few restrictions, as is the case in the USA to an exceptional degree and not just as regards guns, the more we should expect to experience the tragedies.
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Post 18 Feb 2011, 9:08 am

Worth comparing to the "No Fly" list...
That was very well funded and has been rigourously applied.
In response to a small number of incidents with around 3,000 dead...

The problem with any database is always the back log. But going forward, this should be easy to comply with for every state. Its a notification that goes out at the time of commitment.
That states aren't complying with the list as new people are committed has nothing to do with "funding".
 

Post 18 Feb 2011, 9:23 am

I am for the law that prohibits gun ownership based upon mental defect. Are people's rights to privacy being abridged? Yes, and I say good. A person has performed actions that are the reason for not owning a weapon. Unlike other cases lately debated on this forum, there is an articulatory offense committed by a specific individual prohibiting gun ownership.
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Post 18 Feb 2011, 6:36 pm

[Articulatory? Do you mean an "offense" that can be clearly described? Or one having to do with speech? Or one committed via the use of joints?]

It's the line-drawing that gets tricky. For instance, should a person be involuntarily committed - deemed to present an imminent danger to himself or others - based solely on his writings or speech? or should it be a requirement that relevant and diagnostic behaviors be observed?

And you might want to be careful about the use of the phrase "mental defect" because it has a specific legal meaning and might refer to conditions that are permanent but quite mild, and which might not be on the list you have in your head of conditions that ought to preclude gun ownership. For instance, would you deny the right of gun ownership to someone with adult attention deficit disorder? Or someone who's had a stroke and finds it hard to be adequately articulatory? How about someone with early stage Alzheimer's disease?

Are you a libertarian?
 

Post 18 Feb 2011, 7:07 pm

MX,
One that can be clearly described. (sidebar: I hope you were being sarcastic, you are smarter than that otherwise)

I agree that the line-drawing is difficult. I am open to a range for that line. However, as long as gun ownership is not abridged unless behavior or action is "articulated" I see little problems.

As for "Mental Defect" That would go along with the line drawing.

Conservative Libertarian... Yes (Constitutionalist)
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Post 19 Feb 2011, 9:04 pm

x
It's the line-drawing that gets tricky


Always. But thats why any procedure must have the "right of appeal".
At the moment gun ownership is a right and the exercise of the right is done with the utmost convenience.
To make gun ownership less convenient doesn't abridge freedom. It just make's the right also a responsibility.