Yet Another Prediction
By Mitch Berg
I’ve predicted it for years; if anything was going to cause problems for Minnesota’s concealed carry law, it’d be a screwup on the part of government, not the law-abiding gun owner.
And I was right; while one’s application for a permit to purchase or to carry a concealed firearm can be derailed for many reasons (crime record, record of drug or alcohol abuse problems, a history of starting fights that can be documented by a police department), the system for flagging the mentally-ill is broken:
[T]he system for tracking commitments may not be working properly, state officials say, and law enforcement officers probably are not getting the data they need to conduct background checks required by law.
As we noted in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre…:
Federal law should have barred Cho, who fatally shot 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus before killing himself, from buying a gun from a licensed dealer based on his 2005 psychiatric commitment. But because Virginia turned over only information on patients restricted to in-patient care, Cho’s name wasn’t in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. (NICS)
Minnesota’s gun laws don’t distinguish between commitments for inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment. But the state is one of 28 that withholds all of its mental health data from the NICS database.
Asked why, the state’s Department of Human Services said in a prepared statement that it “has not been asked” to provide that information.
Here’s another prediction; the state DHHS has been extremely sympathetic, I’m told by participants in the system, to the demands of advocates for the mentally-ill in Minnesota. These advocates are working – not without reason, obviously – to de-stigmatize mental illness. Unfortunately, as advocates, I’ve noted that many of them view the effects of mental illness through rose-colored glasses, choosing to ignore the fact that while most of the mentally ill will not harm anyone, there are a few Chos out there.
Meanwhile, the system that Minnesota has in place to block anyone who has been committed for psychiatric disorders from buying a gun or obtaining a carrying permit appears to have a serious flaw: The state Supreme Court apparently is not complying with a law that requires it to notify the DHS whenever a judge commits a person to community-based treatment programs, said Patrice Vick, a DHS spokeswoman.
Go figure – a liberal-dominated court sandbagging data in such a way as to sabotage public confidence in the screening system.
Read the whole piece; it’s interesting.
May 7th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
So…according to the lefties, it’s better to stigmatize all gun owners as potential killers and so take away their guns than it is to allow mental patients to feel stigmatized.
The quest for cosmic justice invariably results in injustice for actual people.
May 7th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Yeah, its a tough thing – prior restraint. The problem with so many of the dangerously mentally ill is that they think the world is getting increasingly dangerous, and they need to have guns to protect themselves. How do we differentiate them from actual people?
Come to think of it, gun control is a tough thing: if we say we don’t want any of it, then we can’t argue that we want some of it enforced.
This hurts my head – think I’ll just go back to the “cold dead hands” thing – so much easier.
May 8th, 2007 at 11:05 am
I think even the dangerously mentally ill are actual people. I also think this is, at best, a gross oversimplification of the second amendment debate.
I don’t know of a single person who has the position “we don’t want any of it” with regard to laws pertaining to guns. The binary argument “then we can’t argue that we want some of it enforced” is also false. We could probably argue over “what are reasonable restrictions on firearms in the US” , but leave the false positions and false choices at home.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
All right, cool. You agree that some gun regulation is OK. I can put you in touch with several people who say it is not, but that’s not you.
And yes, they are actual people – guess I was being too subtle there – read the first comment.
And the “binary argument” is not false as a stand-alone, but its off the table and not worth arguing now.