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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   31611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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A culture-war-adjacent court opinion that @The_Nybbler may find entertaining:

  • An 80-year-old man applies for a permit to buy a rifle. The permit is denied, solely because he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for four days forty years ago. He applies for expungement of the records of that commitment, so that he can get the permit.

  • The judge denies the application for expungement.

T.B.'s problematic interaction with LifeStream staff raised questions in the court's mind about T.B.'s "candor to the [c]ourt and fundamental issues that are here."

[T.B.] told the people [at LifeStream] that he was suffering from anxiety and depression. And he said he did that because that’s what he thought he had to say in order to get this appointment so that he could get the evaluation. And a concern to me is that he was not particularly honest with these folks about why he wanted this evaluation.

In that vein, the judge took issue with T.B.'s dismissive characterization of the nature of his hospitalization at Ancora versus the hospital record—namely, that after questioning the staff released him.

In the report it says, "unable to contain on open unit; violent outbursts; threatening; severely agitated; threatening others; yelling; demanding; attempted to strangle his wife at home; violent outbursts; tried to tear side rails off of the [bed]". So, this is not a man who showed up at Ancora mildly agitated or upset, but was described by the doctors down there as threatening behavior, so agitated they couldn't talk to him and violent outbursts towards the people on the staff there.

Regarding his present condition, the court noted that despite the medical reports stating he was stable, T.B. exhibited signs of memory problems and a lack of awareness regarding his own medication regimen.

[T.B.] doesn’t even know what medication he’s taking for his [d]iabetes or for his high cholesterol situation or his [h]yperlipidemia. And that, to me, speaks volumes about not that he’s dangerous to the public safety, but why would we give an 80-year-old man, who can’t even be responsible for his own health, access to a firearm that he wants to use for target practice with his friends. You know, is he going to forget to put the safety on the firearm when he isn’t at the range doing target practice? Is he going to forget to secure it in his home so that people who come to visit don’t have access to it? That’s what’s really of concern to this court.

  • The appeals panel affirms. "The trial court reasonably determined that defendant failed to meet his burden to demonstrate the expungement was in the public interest." No second amendment for him!

I don't pay a lot of attention to gun rights since it's not a particularly salient issue for me, but I'm softly intrinsically in favor of 2A rights. That said, gun advocates routinely make terrible arguments that alienate me from their views. This post is a good example of that.

The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record. Losing rights because of that seems wrong to me, but 2A advocates can't help themselves and go way further:

  • There's that absolutist SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ideology floating around, where any violation of 2A rights is perceived as abhorrent, and thus worthy of maximum outrage. Everyone implicitly agrees with judicial ideology that rights aren't absolute in other regards, as there's no great controversy around e.g. inciting violence being illegal despite the existence of the first amendment. It's the duty of gun rights advocates to show that any given restriction is unreasonable, and I'm sure a lot of them are, but many advocates seem to want to skip this step in favor of leaping to indignant outrage whenever an article like this pops up

  • The facts of this case make it clear the guy is just bringing insufficient evidence. The guy's involuntary committal was violent, which ought to raise the bar for expungement. Then all he brings are a single psychiatrist's evaluation report that wasn't particularly sympathetic (The doctor found T.B. "very talkative," "shaky/trembling," "feeling angry," in "too much pain," and experiencing "memory problems." In his August 14, 2023 evaluation, Dr. Dada diagnosed T.B. with "an adjustment disorder and anxiety,") and an irrelevant NP report. Like, really? This man is your martyr?

I think it's the same for most defenses of basic rights. Either defend the rights of scumbags or everyone loses the right.

Happens in free speech when it's Nazis that need defending. Happens in criminal law when it's pedophiles or rapists getting railroaded.

And of course the question gets asked why not just defend the right for "decent" people. But "decent people" always tends to start looking a little too much like "my political allies".

It would be nice to not have this slippery slope hanging over our heads for every basic right.

I find it much more reasonable to protect the speech of people I disagree with (e.g. Nazis) than to let people with lots of mental illnesses use firearms. Again, no rights are absolute. This is something everyone implicitly agrees with. For free speech we draw the line at incitement. For firearms we draw the line at crazy people (among several other places). If you're pro crazy-people-having-guns, firstly I think that's just silly on its face, and secondly I don't think it really does much to protect non-crazy-people from having their rights not be infringed.

I'm not in favor of crazy people having guns, but I'm not sure I fully trust the system to draw the line on crazy people.

If the system was accurately drawing the line of crazy people I'd be fine with having them all institutionalized. If you are considered too dangerous to own a gun then you are a danger to society in general, after all knives, vehicles, and lighters are still easily accessible for these people.

If you are too crazy to be trusted with a firearm, you should not be out in public, period.

I think that goes too far personally. Someone who e.g. is fine 99% of the time but has occasional severe hallucinations ought to be able to go out and buy food at the local supermarket. If they get unlucky and hit that 1% chance then you probably only have some annoyed retail workers. With guns involved it instantly becomes so much more high-consequence.

I think you can probably draw a line of separation between "normal" people who have personality traits, tendencies, hobbies, and political views I do not like and people who have severe mental illness (or an episode of the same with increased risk of recurrence).

Admittedly this guy was a lot further back so that the standards were different then they are today after some testing and improvement, but you have to work very hard to earn an involuntary stay and be very poorly behaved. Almost ALWAYS it involves true serious mental illness such and Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, severe Borderline, or MDD with suicide attempt or suicidal ideation. Or. It involves someone who is so unpleasant, uncooperative, violent, etc. that they are almost always a dangerous criminal they just might not have gotten caught yet (and the latter bucket is much less common).

If you are a threat to yourself or someone else in a real and foreseeable way you will likely be so again and the amount of danger is quite a bit higher. This is not "I dislike Nazis and they could do bad things!!!" this is "30% chance of murdering someone."

Someone being reasonable and apolitical can definitely draw that line. It's just that it's too easy for bad actors to start being political.

The way states usually handle this is that the person has to have some thing happen like a: has a psychiatric illness b. is a credible threat to themselves or someone else.

The presence of criteria for a psychiatric illness is important here and does most the political protection.

A really common teaching interaction is something like "haha, yeah man this patient is delusional because he is Trump supporter and thinks Obama isn't a citizen" attending puts on a very serious face "no, absolutely not. Political beliefs are not delusional unless they are totally culturally dystonic and fixed, the fact that he won the election is proof that is isn't delusion blah blah...."

Psychiatry is in general a pretty pozzed specialty but they don't fuck around when it comes to that kind of stuff.

You will absolutely see patients get discharged who are odious, violent, domestic abusers, substance users and all kinds of other crap because they don't actually meet commitment criteria and aren't psychiatric.

Now you are more like to see something like "this patient does meet commitment criteria yet we'd usually let him go because it's probably safe to do so however he was using racial slurs towards the staff so in he goes." This is unprofessional but still unfortunately legit.

My wife is a psychiatrist at a public hospital that deals with some of Chicago's sickest and poorest mental cases. I get a pretty good cross section of the stories. It's just not really the case that the kind of politics she's dealing with from her patients are mondain red vs blue tribe stuff. The craziest red tribe anti-vax position you can imagine would not phase her and would sound strange in its groundedness compared to the actual involuntary cases she deals with, which are almost always about refusal to take medication that stops them from like painting the walls with their feces. Psychiatrists are certainly like 400% more lgbt than the general population but they just aren't taking the politics of their patients seriously enough for discrimination to really be a thing, they're fighting tooth and nail just to get the feces smeerers to take their meds.

Absolutely, and while overt delusional beliefs are what pop to non-medical people seeing or hearing about these patients, the real problem is the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (often manifesting as a total inability to care for oneself in a functional way). That is much less exciting but more important for commitment purposes a good chunk of the time.

I think a lot of the doubters here would be way more comfortable if they had a chance to stay in a city crisis center for five minutes.

The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record

Our track record at actually curing serious mental illness isn't that great (especially if it's controlled by medication that the patient is always one dose from going off). Many of those conditions are inherent and fairly permanent.

The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record.

It's a state thing, so it varies, but my understanding is that restriction periods being in some proportion to the burden of compelling a given treatment is the norm. On federal forms, the question about mental health/competence has wording along the lines of "have you ever been evaluated..." but includes an asterisk clarifying that the correct answer is actually your current status, according to the state's laws.

I can also get annoyed at the politics and the (especially online) culture.

A recent example: there was a shooting at Salt Lake City's No Kings protest a couple weeks ago. There is a brief video that shows what went down. It sounds like the SLCPD was aware that event volunteers were carrying pistols which resulted in reported "peacekeepers" (volunteer event staff) shooting a man armed with a rifle.

A pair of volunteers, easily identified by high visibility vests, observed this individual dressed in black "seclude" himself, don a mask, take out his AR, and approach the crowd with his rifle at what looks like low ready. The volunteers draw their pistols, aim at him as seen in the video, and allegedly shout at him to stop. The 24 year old panics, runs towards the crowd, and a volunteer fires 3 times. He hits the the suspect once, but then also kills a bystander beyond him. Turns out charges are not yet filed against anyone, although the 24 year old was initially arrested for reckless endangerment or some such thing.

The demonstrator -- reportedly a lefty anarchist John Brown Club adjacent type -- dressed in all black with a mask approaches the crowd by his lonesome. Apparently he was not prepared to be challenged. Despite the politics of the guy, the open carry fetishists guys, or people pretending to be them online were in absolute uproar about the violation of his rights. Of course it's unreasonable to intervene. How dare they! He didn't even fire a shot. These volunteers had no right to stop this guy from demonstrating if that's what he meant to do. They wrongly believed a different intent. They were probably so concerned about a shooting they created one. They fucked up so bad one of them killed an innocent man.

To me, a basic expectation for carrying in a public demonstration, especially doing so alone while obscuring one's identity, requires all sorts of technique, safety, and etiquette. Sling your weapon, signal your intent, and prepare to be challenged. Be a prosocial advocate. The freedom to demonstrate is limited in trivial ways with my expectations, but we get to have mass gatherings with firearms.

There's that absolutist SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ideology floating around, where any violation of 2A rights is perceived as abhorrent, and thus worthy of maximum outrage.

I find it easy to believe takes like Rov_Scam's below. A trashy individual who can't manage to present himself as a decent, responsible person doesn't get what rights he is entitled to. Pretext for a judge to judge an individual as too irresponsible or dangerous.

Capital A-bsolutists are real, though they are less common among advocates. The absolutist rhetoric is some part cultural signal, part true belief (what is a right?), and part tactical. For the last bit, what benefit is there to giving an inch? 2A groups fight alone for a right, at best, most don't care too much about. The public is fickle and of limited value to the advocate's position. The world and many American jurisdictions set an example that incentivizes and justifies obstinance.

The 2A lobby is arguably more alive than ever, so that also contributes to being annoying. Where and when the lobby fails -- which happens -- many people scream with glee. A great many more shrug.

It's the duty of gun rights advocates to show that any given restriction is unreasonable

Unfortunately, yes. A government reinterprets, ignores, or dismantles a right, and the onus is on the citizenry to challenge it. This should carry additional explanatory power for any stubbornness. It would be nice to not require advocacy at all in a high-trust, high-functioning society. Lots of things would be nice!

Are you going to send a donation to a 2A advocacy group because, upon reflection of the details in this case or another, you perceive them as acting reasonably? As @gattsuru studiously documents for us, every little niggle, every small "in", each precedent and alternative interpretation that can be exploited gets explored fully.

Also, 2A rights are still largely intact? Some states can screw with you a bit or place some minor restrictions on firearms, but none have been able to ban them outright.

The thing is that this is not a constitutional challenge, but instead an attempt to expunge his record. Possibly importantly, there are other effects of that besides just the ability to buy a gun. My understanding is that there is no entitlement for the record to be expunged, and it will be at the discretion of the state through their statutory procedure.

Though, it may be possible that making this challenge is necessary before raising a second amendment challenge. Since there is a statutory way that he might be able to get his record expunged, then it would make an as-applied second amendment challenge much weaker. The courts would likely find that the challenge is not ripe as there are other statutory remedies. I'm not sure about this though and possibly going for a second amendment challenge right away could have been the right legal move. Going for a facial challenge is also much harder, as the state can easily show a compelling interest in keeping guns away from the actually mentally ill, and that the law is reasonably tailored to this goal.

After losing this expungement case, the next step is probably to go for a second amendment challenge in federal court. Since his ability to buy a gun has been totally taken away, the burden of proof would then be on the state to affirmatively prove that he's an actual threat. Giving guns to forgetful elderly people might not be ideal but it's their right. Not sure how much of a nut this guy is otherwise, but if he really is then possibly the state could win.

[disclaimer: IANAL]

The rule is that all administrative remedies must be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed (successfully).

This has actually historically had some awkward results. For the VA example below, there was a VA-internal administrative appeals system required by the NIAA, but it would routinely sit on appeals for years. NICS itself has an ATF Relief From Disability program authorized by statute that has been defunded since 1993 and wasn't fast before that. Sometimes this precluded judicial review entirely, other times required demonstrating constructive denial.

That said, this court case here is the lawsuit after exhaustion of administrative appeals. You aren't required to (and are actively discouraged from) bring each matter individually. There's actually a bunch of really complex res judicata rules about bringing a lawsuit over the same legal matter without having a different underlying act, though I don't know them well enough to be absolutely confident that they'd preclude a second lawsuit here.

That said, there's basically zero chance of a successful Second Amendment lawsuit on this matter. SCOTUS has already had fairly sympathetic plaintiffs available, such as Mai v. United States; they've punted. Most successful lawsuits have depended entirely on process or statutory definitions regarding who counts as disqualified to start with. The one exception is the Sixth Circuit, notably distant from New Jersey, and that case depended on the government completely disavowing any current finding of dangerousness or similarity to currently-mentally-ill people.

After losing this expungement case, the next step is probably to go for a second amendment challenge in federal court.

No point. The appropriate District and Circuit courts uphold all gun regulations and the Supreme Court has said they don't want to hear it. We've hit the end of the line for gun rights; in as much as they exist they exist in Red states only.

The Supreme Court has also said (repeatedly) that gun laws in place at the founding were permissible, including those on individual who self-disqualified through crime or violence.

Bringing this as a challenge under the Bruen standard is a loser and should absolutely lose.

This man has been convicted of no crime.

That's not the analysis that the Court directed in Bruen. If there was an analogous restriction at the Founding, then it's presumed to be a longstanding restriction.

You can wishcast for a different Bruen that creates a bright line that says nothing short of a conviction suffices. That is not the Bruen that we have today.

These committment laws are all much later than the founding; there was not an analogous restriction at the founding. There were restrictions for crime, but no one has demonstrated crime.

I don't think that's right -- a number of the founding States had restrictions against those unsuitable that did not rest upon a criminal conviction.

For example, PA prohibited firearm ownership to "Any person going about from place to place begging, asking or subsisting upon charity, and for the purpose of acquiring money or living, and who shall have no fixed place of residence, or lawful occupation in the county or city".

Or more aptly, Kansas prohibited transferring a firearm "to any person of notoriously unsound mind". It's hard to imagine "treated for a violent mental illness" as not coterminous with "unsound mind".

For example, PA prohibited firearm ownership to "Any person going about from place to place begging, asking or subsisting upon charity, and for the purpose of acquiring money or living, and who shall have no fixed place of residence, or lawful occupation in the county or city".

This isn't a permanent restriction.

Or more aptly, Kansas

Entered the union in 1861.

More comments

This is an object lesson in why people who think they don't need lawyers for stuff like this generally do need lawyers (unless, of course, this guy was so bad that he had a lawyer and the lawyer couldn't do anything about it). His big mistakes were:

  1. He tried to downplay the 1983 commitment with testimony that was contrary to the medical records. My bitch ex wife gave me some pills that made me crazy but not too crazy because the doctors quickly realized I shouldn't have been there is pretty much textbook self-serving bullshit that judges hear regularly. A lawyer would have examined him so as to frame the matter as a guy who turned to drugs to deal with the stress of a bad marriage, which caused him to do regrettable things that he doesn't entirely remember.

  2. He lied to the psychiatrist who examined him about why he was there because he thought he needed to to get an appointment, and then admitted his dishonesty to the court. A lawyer would have made him an appointment with a doctor who would provide the exact kind of evaluation the court looks for in cases like this.

  3. There were statements in the file suggesting the guy was taking psych medications that he couldn't provide an explanation for other than that he wasn't taking any psych meds. He also seemed to have a more intimate knowledge of Lifestream and the doctors that practiced there than someone whose contact with the mental health system ended 40 years prior.

  4. Most people who were involuntarily committed will have had continued psychiatric treatment for some time afterward and a history of how their condition progressed. When I was at the disability bureau, if I saw an involuntary commitment on someone's record and no other psych history, I'd assume they were homeless or in some other kind of situation where they were prevented from getting treatment.

  5. We have no idea, from reading the opinion, what this guy was actually like or how he came off in court.

In other words, the judge could tell that the guy was full of shit, and since he has the burden of proof, she wasn't going to grant the expungement. Keep in mind that the court isn't going to subpoena this guy's entire medical history, so they're only relying on what he brought with him. Given that the guy doesn't come off as trustworthy and there's reason to believe he's more familiar with certain things than he's letting on, the court might have suspected that the guy wasn't providing a complete mental health record.

The first trouble is that, even assuming these things are all true, this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.

The second trouble is that, especially when coming from someone that says "that seem onerous but that's the point" when it comes to this class of regulation, there's a lot of 'oh, my personal experience makes this seem a whole lot more reasonable' depends on things that the rest of us can't know.

The third's that assuming enough round up to true requires a lot of faith in the New Jersey appellate courts, and there's reason to believe judicial bias here older than most people writing on this site in general, and for at least one of the two judges here.

The deep problem is that these don't apply to the all or even a majority of the cases you're supposedly focused on, and could easily apply to the harmless. The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook. That's not only non-theoretical, it's a decade-old.

this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.

I hate to break it to you, but the same applies to any other area of the law, including whether the state can revoke your own liberty for a period of years. Yes, there's the added protection in that case that you will be entitled to an attorney if you can't afford to pay for one, which attorney will probably do an adequate job but might not, but in any event, all the other concerns you raise still apply. If you have suggestions on how we can idiot proof the legal system so that any moron can act pro se and get similar results to those that lawyers get now, I'm all ears, but a more realistic approach is to do more to ensure access to legal services for those who can't afford them.

As a side note, while that attorney was on record for the appeal, it isn't clear that the guy was represented at the initial hearing. Based on the available record, I'm inclined to believe that he wasn't. It's clear from the appellate record that the guy wasn't prepped to testify, probably hadn't looked at the records he was using to make his case, and relied on the report of a regular treating psychiatrist rather than a forensic psychiatrist who would have testified in court. There are attorneys in Pennsylvania who specialize in this sort of thing and no, it isn't cheap, but it's what you have to do.

The main point I want to make, though, is that you're treating this as though these hearings are prerequisite to exercising one's Second Amendment rights. But they're not; this is the case of someone who was already adjudicated ineligible to purchase firearms based on a separate proceeding, at which the right to own firearms was collateral to the determination. To the extent that he has any right to the expungement of that record, the burden of proof is on him, as the state already met theirs. The procedural posture here is no different than that of a convicted felon petitioning the court for an expungement so he can buy a gun legally. The judge denying that petition isn't revoking any right, she's merely declining to reinstate a right that was already revoked in a prior proceeding.

There is no right to an expungement; it's entirely a creature of statute. New Jersey could just as easily make expungement unavailable in any circumstances, or have a process to restore some disabilities involuntary commitment results in but retain the prohibition on owning a gun, or only allow expungement in circumstances that don't apply here, and the guy would have been SOL from the start, and this case wouldn't exist, and no one would be bitching about how his rights are being violated.

This whole matter is complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with expungement and not an alternative process for restoration of gun rights. Most other states have some process for this, but an expungement is much easier to get in New Jersey than in other states, the standards are similar to those the Feds use, and it's ultimately a stronger system since an expungement's ability to remove the disability isn't reliant on whether the process is compliant with the Federal guidelines. Whether or not there's a constitutional right for there to be some mechanism to restore gun rights to those with a history of involuntary commitment is an open question. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment prohibited the permanent revocation of rights just because someone was committed at one point in his life, but it didn't elaborate with regard to what was necessary to restore those rights.

In any event, it's hard to see what the court did wrong here. The guy has the burden of proof to show he should get an expungement, and he provided very little evidence beyond "I'm not nuts and you should take my work for it". He lied to the court about the circumstances surrounding the commitment. He admitted to intentionally misrepresenting his mental health to the doctor whose opinion he was relying on. How is the court supposed to base a determination on a bare-bones statement made by a doctor whom the applicant admits didn't get an accurate assessment? The applicant's testimony lacked credibility, the doctor's report lacked credibility, so what's left? Even if you can pick your way through the weeds and offer some basis upon which she could have granted the expungement, that's a long way from saying that she made the kind of error that the appellate court would reverse, and the two Republican judges who wrote the opinion seemed to understand that.

I hate to break it to you, but the same applies to any other area of the law, including whether the state can revoke your own liberty for a period of years. Yes, there's the added protection in that case that you will be entitled to an attorney if you can't afford to pay for one, which attorney will probably do an adequate job but might not, but in any event, all the other concerns you raise still apply.

And the additional due process rights, and numerous opportunities to seek freedom, and the burden of proof falling on the government, and the burden of proof being much harsher on the government, yada yada.

As a side note, while that attorney was on record for the appeal, it isn't clear that the guy was represented at the initial hearing. Based on the available record, I'm inclined to believe that he wasn't.

It's possible, but a) we don't know and b) there's absolutely a lot of well-represented and reasonable clients that just don't present well to judges, especially when you're talking 80-year-olds.

There are attorneys in Pennsylvania who specialize in this sort of thing and no, it isn't cheap, but it's what you have to do.

Yeah, that this is "what you have to do" is a good part of my objection. Access to justice and civil rights dependent on thousands or tens of thousands of dollars is a right denied. (The other part is that it's far from clear that would be enough.)

But they're not; this is the case of someone who was already adjudicated ineligible to purchase firearms based on a separate proceeding, at which the right to own firearms was collateral to the determination.... The procedural posture here is no different than that of a convicted felon petitioning the court for an expungement so he can buy a gun legally.

Yes, the procedural posture here treat someone who had a mental health commitment like a convicted felon. Is that proceeding to issue a mental health commitment equivalent to the conviction of a felon?

I can't find the process New Jersey used in 1980, since a 1987 revision to state law was noteworthy for requiring a finding of dangerousness and mental illness, but the current law still allows initial holds for 72 hours without ever seeing or hearing from a judge, and an intermediate period up to 20 days with a court order under reduced requirements. Even assuming that T.B. had something more serious than a rubber stamp in 1980, it still had nowhere near the burden of proof, clear notice of law he was violating, or any similar due process right. (He near-certainly wouldn't have had access to an attorney, even had he seen a courtroom, and might have even been ex parte for the court hearing given the state of laws in other nearby jurisdictions at the time.)

There's a reason that this overlaps closer to the GVRO or various Red Flag laws -- but those processes are intentionally supposed to be temporary! The federal laws here apply even to mental health episodes that happened before the GCA1968 was even passed, and they chase a person to their grave unless specifically expunged.

Is the action here similar? Felons can be disarmed because being a felon is a long-lasting indicator of propensity to act violently outside the law (although even that's kinda marginal given how broad modern 'felonies' have become). Was T.B.'s issue in 1980 some long-lasting inherent problem that would likely recur? Or was it one time event? We don't know. T.B. provided some evidence that he had no current mental illness. No one on the court provides any evidence against that, they just woolgathered about how it wasn't trustworthy enough in some vague ways that their guts didn't like. The judge specifically said that these gutchecks pointed "not that he’s dangerous".

In any event, it's hard to see what the court did wrong here. The guy has the burden of proof to show he should get an expungement, and he provided very little evidence beyond "I'm not nuts and you should take my work for it".

From a statutory perspective, the petitioner is only required to prove that their illness is in remission or substantially improved; the court (and the original medical director) are the ones to "find" if the petitioner "will not likely act in a manner dangerous to the public safety and finds that the grant of relief is not contrary to the public interest" based on "the circumstances of why the commitment or determination was imposed upon the petitioner, the petitioner's mental health record and criminal history, and the petitioner's reputation in the community". The petitioner demonstrated that their condition was substantially improved, and provided some evidence that they were not likely to act in a matter dangerous to public safety. And the judge, rather than pointing to some part of the petitioner's mental health record, or reputation in the community, or circumstances of their original commitment, said that they didn't like some of the evidence the petitioner provided or the petitioner's demeanor, and then the case is done, caput, do not pass go, do not collect your rights or your 200 USD.

I frankly have no idea how the judge in question here can honestly take a look at a forty-year period with no criminal history or further interactions with the mental health system or criminal justice system, a commitment that the judge found was motivated by the man attempting to strangle his wife, and say "I don’t know if that means that his condition is substantially improved or in substantial remission." I don't have high opinions of New Jersey cops! But I don't have that low an opinion, either.

That would just be annoying in other contexts. I'd like a lot more due process and a lot less 'whatever some jerkoff judge thought was good policy between ranting in their chambers', but I'm not optimistic about matters as simple as ['maybe judges shouldn't hear trials on laws that they pledge specifically to support'.

Here, we are talking a constitutional right, a petitioner who has never been convicted of a crime and may never have seen the inside of a court room before this appeal, and a judge who has rewritten the law until his or her only guiding star is 'what can I imagine' and only boundaries are 'could impact the public interest', in a jurisdiction that has spent literal generations and has extant caselaw demanding "the citizen acts at his peril" in this context. It is a problem when there is an unclear burden on the petitioner to fight any evidence that any judge may ever want or make up, in a hearing that becomes an adversarial hearing against that judge, and where there is no further opportunity or discussion before trial about what the judge decided was the magic words beyond 'hire the best and most specialized lawyer possible'.

T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition. We don't even get a judiciary interest in that. At best, you can argue that this complied with the statute, as long as you put a heavy thumb on judicial interpretation of the 'well, it doesn't say we can't' sort. The courts could have subpeona'd medical records, or written that the petitioner refused to provide access. The courts could speak to a criminal record or lack thereof. The courts could have pointed to some critical issue in the original commitment hearing, if any existed, pointing to likely repetition or recurrence. They could have asked his wife or coworkers or doctors if he was strangling them. They didn't. Nor, for that matter did the judges comment on a lack of submissions on these points from the petition’s side.

They tea-leafed whether a guy could remember a name of a medication while speaking extemporaneously, or whether he might forget to use a safety. They announced that he needs some time working in the mental health system to prove to them he had gotten better (how long? why would that matter to an 80-year old?). And then they washed their hands of any questions of whether he was a danger to the community or mentally ill or what say you.

To treat this as in the interest of justice because you, personally, can smell a rat, in a case you couldn't be bothered to look at the first sheet before writing about?

I frankly have no idea how the judge in question here can honestly take a look at a forty-year period with no criminal history or further interactions with the mental health system or criminal justice system,

I think the implication of the proceedings was that this was not true, clearly wasn't true, and the court didn't want to waste time and money on sorting it so used other procedural grounds to close the matter.

Most people who fail in these kinds of proceedings are so allergic to basic competence and not being an entitled asshole that nobody who actually witnesses the situation feels bad. In the same that you look at most police encounters and go: "Should he have beat his ass? No. Did he absolutely earn it? Yes."

Most principled third parties read about these situations and fear some authoritarian judge taking rights away (which does happen) but the vast majority is "please give me something, anything to work with.....okay I guess you won't."

I think the implication of the proceedings was that this was not true, clearly wasn't true, and the court didn't want to waste time and money on sorting it so used other procedural grounds to close the matter.

But from a due process perspective, that's an abomination. If the problem genuinely was that the court believed TB had a criminal history or other occurrences of mental health breakdown, TB has absolutely no reason, having read the court's public record, to actually go and find proof on those things. There's not even a reference to what better proof would be about.

((Admittedly, because it's quite possible TB presented perfectly adequate proof, given that the expungement process requires petitioners give permission for a full background and mental health record search, and the law requires the court to ask the committing facility. I don't trust New Jersey judges.))

And more critically, it's trivially resolvable. Assuming without evidence that the court would be crippled by asking for criminal records, it costs the judge mere seconds to write out that the plaintiff needed to provide them. Instead, if he doesn't die or run out of money or patience first, TB's going to back to court with a list of his medications in his pocket, proudly mispronounce every single one, and the judge will find some other excuse that doesn't really matter.

Most principled third parties read about these situations and fear some authoritarian judge taking rights away (which does happen) but the vast majority is "please give me something, anything to work with.....okay I guess you won't."

And if judges want us to believe that, they a) need to actually write it into the public record, and b) have public records giving normal people reason to distrust them.

I think a good thought experiment here is to look at traffic tickets.

Do you think cops should have flexibility in giving a ticket or not?

Choosing not to is also abomination of due process, it is inconsistent and potentially abusable and corrupt. It's also flexible and can work out well.

The system works better for most people overall when have some flexibility in the system. Some people are screwed over by that flexibility however in my experience it's usually for good reason (in this case: guy is likely an asshole).

If you want to remove the slack and flexibility in the system you can certainly advocate for that but you'll find it probably isn't what you want in practice.

With respect to this guy specifically, I got the impression that it seemed like he had more involvement with mental health care that he was letting on and was trying to minimize which is not a good sign.

I understand what you're saying, but you're imposing a standard on the court that simply doesn't exist. He was involuntarily committed in 1983. He's presumed unfit to own firearms. You may have a disagreement about the process that was in place before 1987, but that's not what's at issue here. The guy isn't arguing that the record should be expunged because his original commitment was invalid, it's unlikely that he would be able to prove that it was invalid due to the passage of time, and the only way such an argument would work would be in the context of a ruling that all involuntary commitments prior to 1987 are presumptively invalid on procedural grounds. But again, that's not the issue here, and the court isn't going to relitigate this on its own.

Operating from that presumption, it's T.B.'s burden to prove that he qualifies for expungement, not the court's burden to prove that he doesn't. So, yeah, the court could have subpeonaed any number of different things, but they didn't, because they're under no obligation to prove that this guy is unfit to own weapons. That's already been established, insofar as the law is concerned, and if he wants the expungement, he has to provide the evidence himself. And what evidence did he provide? His own testimony, which suffered a debilitating lack of credibility, and a note from a psychiatrist which he admitted was obtained under false pretenses. The only thing we're left with that doesn't implicate T.B's lack of credibility is his lack of criminal record, which is persuasive but not dispositive. There's no provision of New Jersey law stating that the court has to grant an expungement just because someone hasn't committed any crimes for a period of time.

There's no legal issue here. All we have is you disagreeing with the factual findings of a judge who met the guy and reviewed the entire record, which, fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But it's no different than people who disagree with a jury verdict based on news reports they saw on TV. It's a factual issue, not a legal one, and no appeals court is going to overturn a finding of fact unless the evidence is so overwhelming that the conclusion is patently unreasonable.

I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:

T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.

Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.

My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.

T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.

There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.

There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.

The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.

We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.

I feel like this isn't a case about your right to a firearm per se, but a case about your right to lie to get into a mental institution and then say "take backsies, I was just trolling" later.

As far as I can understand it, the timeline is:

  • In 1983, T.B. was involuntarily committed in Ancora. There's some skepticism over exactly what degree of behavior this involved (ie, TB says he was violent pre-admission and then some time later was released after questioning, Ancora wrote that he was violent after admission), but T.B. does not claim that the commitment was illegitimate or trolling.

  • In 2022, T.B. went to LifeStream for outpatient treatment claiming interest in treatment for anxiety (and depression?), but really wanting to get a 'I'm not crazy-crazy' note. Neither anxiety nor depression would be disqualifying for firearms purchase even if he did have them (probably. NJ's a little arbitrary here).

T.B. was not trying to undo the LifeStream visit, but to remove the records about the Ancora commitment. The court held that the standard was not just that " their illness has either "substantially improved" or is in "substantial remission" since their discharge from a mental health facility" -- which it clearly had -- but that T.B. had to actively prove that the expungement of his Ancora record was in the public interest, and as a result it was not sufficient to demonstrate he was not actively dangerous. They had evidence that the man's mental health had improved, and none that it had not, and decided that this left the question unanswered and unanswerable. They had evidence that the man was not dangerous (literally "speaks volumes about not that he’s dangerous to the public safety"); the judge ducked it because the judge determined on his own that TB might forget a safety maybe.

It's possible (even more-likely-than-not) that the courts would have been able to withhold expungement under a more serious standard focusing on dangerousness or on continuing mental illness. But the issue is that they didn't have to actually interact with that more serious standard or any standard at all, and Rov_Scam's jumping in to inform us that it's tots reasonable anyway.

EDIT: you are correct that there was no 2A analysis involved.

I think your objection may be conflating two or three issues - lack of clarity over the standard that should or was used, the connection between that standard and 2A rights, and @Rov_Scam's comment about problems with his claim the record should be expunged. It's bad that court processes can be abused to deny someone their 2A rights, but the states have other reasons for wanting this information, so the state putting the burden on the individual to get the record expunged and erring on the side of retained records makes sense. (Note: I'm not endorsing a policy of such, merely noting it's rational.) Either way, the 2A implication is incidental to the state standards, even if one is incredulous that procedures won't be abused. The comment about the problems with this specific claim would equally apply, had there been no 2A implication. It's easy to imagine a quasi-mirror scenario with 8A and a convict failing to get mental health records considered in their sentencing.

The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook.

Could you give some more context on what this is, for those unfamiliar? All I can find is a rule about financial professionals having to act in their clients' best interests.

The National Instant Criminal Background Check Systems (NICS) is a 90s-era system that (almost) all buyers of firearms have to undergo every time they buy (almost) any firearm. Despite its name, it checks not just criminal history, but also every other category under the 1968 GCA that disqualifies a person from owning (almost any) firearm, where the disqualifying incident has been reported to the FBI. While most people notice this only when buying a firearm, those who get a DQ result from NICS are on notice that they can not legally own (almost) any firearms, no matter what conditions they received them.

One lesser-known disqualification is that of those who are 'adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution', which is the prong T.B. in this New Jersey case failed. However, the exact edges of those definitions are fuzzy. Most jurisdictions require some level of adversarial hearing or multiple doctors reviewing the commitment, but neither rule is part of the statute and neither have bright-line across-the-US caselaw.

While the Department of Veteran's Affairs had long held the ability to report 'mental defectives' since the 1993 establishment of NICS, and Clinton made some acts on this road, the Obama administration held that the Department of Veterans Affairs could use existing records to determine what veterans were 'mental defectives' and should do so automatically and categorically. To do so, they relied on determinations of what veterans had a fiduciary appointed to help manage their financial affairs, a process that had very low standards of evidence, a presumption of incompetence against the veteran, no due process rights to representation, did not require any qualifications or training for the administrative staff making the determination -- and, of course, did not give adequate preliminary notice that the act would strip away any Second Amendment rights. 95%+ of all "adjudicated as a mental defective" submissions to NICS from federal agencies were coming from the VA in 2013 and 2014. This ended up including hundreds of thousands of submissions.

((Continuing on a certain theme, the Obama administration based this policy's authorization on the bipartisan NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007.))

Most critically, veterans could and often did receive or even actively request fiduciaries solely to assist with financial affairs, not because they were dangerous or actually incompetent, such as if they wanted their spouse to have easier access to their records or VA fund. This could mean dementia or severe suicidal ideation, but because the VA was also getting eaten by paperwork in the same time period, this also could just be a matter of who in the family had the time or the patience to deal with the bullshit or, again, who could balance a checkbook.

Ostensibly, the policy was meant to reduce veteran suicide. To be charitable to the point of foolishness, I’m sure the proponents were absolutely sure that they were reducing firearms suicides (or lost guns) by making them less available to some vets. But given the near-complete disinterest in whether these disarmed vets were particularly likely to commit suicide, that’s about the best you can get, and then we’re back to the federal government treated arbitrary restrictions on a constitutional right as an unalloyed good, and these people targeted because they’d be less able to challenge it.

The Obama administration later proposed a federal regulation applying the same sort of system to Social Security and was expected to hit at least 75,000 people; this was blocked under the CRA in 2017. Some appropriations riders in 2024 and 2025 blocked the VA from using funds to submit records to NICS except where a finding of dangerousness or a court order was involved, though the last rider I'm aware of expired in March.

Yeah, maybe he was actually crazy?

On the one hand, this is a horshit denial of 2nd ammendment rights based on bullshit case law that actively makes everyone involved less safe (its the same debate being had right now in the pilot community- when you punish people for seeking mental health care, no one is going to seek mental health care). The courts should be fucking ashamed, and the justices involved run out of town on a rail.

On the other hand, the amount of times I have been muzzle swept by old boomer fudds at the range who cant remeber the 4 rules of gun safety much less their blood pressure medication is way too damn high, and I am all for not letting them have guns.

A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.

On the other hand, the amount of times I have been muzzle swept by old boomer fudds at the range who cant remeber the 4 rules of gun safety much less their blood pressure medication is way too damn high, and I am all for not letting them have guns.

I've said before that the quickest way to lose your 2A absolutist beliefs is to work the gun counter at your LGS for a weekend.

A competency test is not the same as the "is this person mentally ill and capable of violence test".

I'm not at all against them, but it's not enough for someone actually admitted to a mental institution for violent psychopathy to take his meds one day, pass a test and then get to own a gun.

Yes, at some level, we are going to have to exclude people that seek mental health treatment from some parts of society. They should probably not be surgeons or airline pilots or foster parents. That's just reality -- pretending that the right answer is that we have to totally close our eyes to their actual history is just bonkers. It's like some progressive screed that a bank can't screen job applicants on the basis of being ex-felons -- it's divorced from the actual reality of human experience.

My fantasy system is one where the right to buy almost any gun is licensed, but the licensing procedure is devolved to a local County Level gun club.

Virtually every gun owner I know thinks that some people shouldn't have guns, they just don't trust the government to make that determination. The anti-gun fanatics and the local range guys would agree on 95-99% of cases, but we can't get there because of agency and trust problems. If the anti-gun crowd granted gun owners the right to self-police gun licensing they would get most of what they wanted without a fight.

This is why one of my favorite policies is when I went for my CCW, I had to write down three references. At the time I thought, wow, what kind of dumbass policy is this, all I need to do to have a gun is have three friends? Then I heard of so many people who either can't find three people who will say they should have a gun and never apply; or who somehow manage to write down people who, when contacted, actively say they shouldn't have a gun! And while that's a minority of the people who shouldn't have guns, they definitely shouldn't have guns.

I'd want to see the same thing with gun clubs. To have a ccw or to buy certain classes of firearms, you have to be a member in good standing and spend time at your local gun club. This would require interacting with other people at the local gun club, who would naturally notice shitbirds or whackadoos or terrorists or the criminally insane in those interactions much more effectively than will the government.

but the licensing procedure is devolved to a local County Level gun club.

Oh, great, bring small-group politics into it, that'll surely make things good.

My greatest fear of all this is that since the records can come back to bite several decades after the fact (in this case the man had been hospitalized 40 years ago) and might not be able to be expunged, this will only discourage people who want to own guns from interacting with the mental health system. It’s bad on both ends — it doesn’t protect the public from crazy people with guns (or at least those smart enough to understand that going to a doctor means losing the right to a gun), and it likewise means that people suffering from those illnesses continue to suffer as they avoid treatment— possibly to the point of self-harm or harming others. There’s no better way, in my view to keep someone from self-reporting a mental health problem than to tell them it will negatively affect them for the rest of their lives.

This only applies to involuntary commitments. If you're feeling suicidal and check yourself into a mental hospital for treatment, it's not going to affect your ability to buy a gun. On the other hand, if you attempt suicide and get 302'd (in PA), it will. The way the law is set up now actually encourages people to seek voluntary treatment before it becomes enough of a problem that the state has to intervene.

For the purpose of federal law, unless theres' been intervening changes to the law or caselaw, 302s don't count, because they're not adversarial or judicial hearings and often run ex parte. They do count for state law, though.

The mental defective side of the bar has been used very widely, if not consistently. And some places will ingest someone who comes to them voluntarily as if they weren't willing (or even treat a voluntary admission as involuntary without undergoing the normal procedures), though thankfully that's one of the few places that courts have been willing to push back on.

But otherwise, yes; federal regulations require that it be involuntary.

I will caveat that many states have separate rules that trigger on voluntary commitment, or don't even require commitment at all (hey, Hawaii!). New Jersey is one such state; applications for a purchase permit require applicants to complete a consent to mental health record search form. While the statute only specifically prohibits giving permits to people with a voluntary or involuntary current committment (no, I don't know why), both state courts and police generally treat it as a blanket prohibition, along with many inpatient procedures. T.B. here isn't even getting to that point, so he can't challenge it, either.

The average person does not understand this.

Because it is not, in fact, true. In New Jersey (and perhaps other states) if you check yourself into a mental hospital you are disqualified from buying a gun. If you're involuntarily committed you can remove the disqualification by getting your record expunged, but I do not believe there is an expungement process for voluntary committement.

In NJ, any commitment or mental health diagnosis is grounds for denial of a gun permit, and once you've been diagnosed the burden of proof is on you to show it's not unsafe for you to own a gun.

(and a 302 or equivalent is a nonjudicial process, which means you get to lose your gun rights forever nationwide on the word of a cop and a doctor)

this will only discourage people who want to own guns from interacting with the mental health system

This is exactly what you should do. If your rights can be taken away permanently by interacting with the mental health system, you should avoid interacting with it. The Catholic Church has it right in this case -- what you say to your confessor is between you, him, and presumably God, and fuck the interests of society. If mental health professionals can't live up to that, they should be avoided.

In New Jersey, being New Jersey, it's even worse. You have to tell them every interaction with the mental health system you have (not just committment, any time you ever saw one), including name and affiliation of the doctor. If you don't have that information you can't even apply for a permit; you can't challenge this because there's nothing to challenge.

See my comment above, but voluntarily interacting with the mental health system isn't what gets you barred from owning a gun; it's avoiding the mental health system until things get so bad you're forced into it.

  • -11

Hé just said New Jersey did ban people from owning a gun for voluntary interactions with the mental health system?

Yeah, they're not even subtle about it.

Not so. New Jersey makes voluntary admission to an inpatient mental health program cause for denial of a firearm permit. They also ask on their firearms form for ANY interaction with a mental health professional:

"Have you ever been attended, treated, or observed by any doctor or psychiatrist or at any hospital or mental institution on an inpatient or outpatient basis for any mental or psychiatric condition?" If yes, give the name and location of the doctor, psychiatrist, hospital, or institution and the date(s) of such occurrence

They're not asking for your health.

I’m in total agreement here. There’s almost no upside to going into the medical mental health system, which doesn’t even work that well anyway, and is pretty much used by the state to keep people from exercising their rights.

A way around this is to

go to a different range.

I do, but boomer-fuddville is convenient to me, so if i need to zero a scope or try a new build I can be in an out in under an hour instead of making it a half-day excursion. I make a point of loudly calling out all of these violations to the RSO, and they are pretty good about clamping down on it, but they shouldnt have to intervene in the first place.

A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.

Jim Crow needn't be brought up at all. The countless hoops that New York State has instituted just to be able to carry a pistol (despite being a "shall issue" state now thanks to the Supreme Court) makes it clear that such processes absolutely will be abused (and already are). If we could actually trust our elected officials not to be fuckwad tyrants I'd support measures like the ones you suggest, but until that day (i.e. likely never) I'll stick with near universal gun rights.

Agreed. If you want to own a gun to keep at home as you please you should be required to pass a certain standard of shooting exam at your local range. The test should be at a level that the average person would manage to pass after 3 months of training once a week, no different to how driving tests work.

What if you're a single woman living alone going to college and some guy keeps breaking into your house while you're asleep and he keeps trying to throw acid on your face? And you report it to the police and they think you're crazy and don't investigate?

Can you have a gun in less than 3 months in that case?

Well we make policy for aggregates, not for individuals. X number of possible self-defence use cases obviously cannot outweigh an infinite number of cases of firearms purchased by unsuitable individuals, there are no solutions etc. etc.

Just saying, "this person is too crazy to have a gun" overlaps with "the police are unfairly ignoring threats to this person's life"

In the UK we have the exact same problem. Still no gun necessary.

Pepper spray though is a good alternative (and honestly needs to be more widely available here).

Or equally you can have some sort of emergency gun licencing scheme where you get to have your gun early provided you can prove you have committed to taking lessons and passing your test and there is a genuine need like the case you mention, with a large and serious penalty if then you abandon your lessons without passing but don't hand the gun in.

Ok in my story above after the second time she bought a gun in less than a day and pulled it out on him the third time and there hasn't been an incident since.

Here in America we have FREEDOM (in some states)

I'm on board only if the government pays gives me a gun and ammo to practice with.

You have to pay for driving lessons too with your own car and instructor and fuel, why should it be any different for guns?

Driving isn't a constitutional right

There is also a constitutional right to a jury trial in the US. However for civil cases I believe you still have to pay a jury fee to request one. The fact that something is a constitutional right doesn't mean the government can't make reasonable requests to the person who wants to exercise that right; in much the same way here, 13 weeks (3 months) of once weekly lessons (2 hours) is just 26 hours of gun practice before letting the person keep their gun at home as they wish. That's not excessive at all.

It would be, if the constitution was written today. Much of the bill of right was in responses to specific abuses by the British government, e.g. the third amendment exists because of the quartering acts. If the founders had witnessed the way the current government controls people through threatening their driving licenses, which are functionally required to participate in modern society anywhere outside of New York City, they would have surely included an amendment guaranteeing the right to drive.

the current government controls people through threatening their driving licenses

This is a pretty odd thing to say given how generously drivers are treated in much of the Anglosphere. To actually get banned from driving in the US or UK you have to be preposterously negligent. Recently a footballer here in Britain was caught speeding eight times in as many weeks (and none of them were even close), lied to the police after some of them and was given a driving ban of less than a month. There are perhaps few less sympathetic groups in the Western world than suspended drivers.

All very likely true, but it remains so that driving isn't a constitutional right.

None of that is necessary to keep a car at home.

Yes, but it is necessary if you ever want to drive the car. A compromise here could be that yes you can keep the gun reversibly modified so that it can never shoot (to look scary or whatever) but if you were to ever attempt to remove the modification to use it without a proper licence the law will come down upon you like a ton of bricks, just like how with driving (but much more severely).

You can drive a car on your own land without a driver’s license, vehicle license, seat belt, etc. By analogy, you should be able to use a gun on your own property without any licensing or training requirements.

Thé équivalent to a drivers license for guns is actually a concealed carry license, which in my state does(or did when I got it) require a minimum shooting score.

Thank you for sharing this!

I enjoyed that in a large part he seems to be sunk by the fact that he can't name his blood pressure medication.

This is vindicating to me, given the number of times I have asked a patient what life saving medicine they are on and gotten the response of "dunno."

Jeez, you'd think they'd at least say "the round little red ones"

Some people will give us that info but it's usually pretty useless as make and manufacturer issues mean that the level of variety is high.

I had the opposite reaction medication names are the fucking worst.

If you want me to remember the name of a medication name it something that makes sense like "blood pressure fixer" not something that looks like a latin vomited up a few different flower names. If there is more than one blood pressure fixer pill then start adding numbers or company names after the initial part of the name.

They should go back to the old-fashioned "Dr. Billings' Soothing Syrup" type names.

If it was anglo names that would help with memorization. If it was mainly non-anglo names I think I'd be just as screwed. I've learned from reading translated works that only anglo names actually stick with me. And I fear in today's culture it would be lots of non-anglo names.

A while back I played a parlor game where you had to look at a name and decide if it was a medication, a Chinese drop-shipper on Amazon, or a character in a fantasy novel.

The average score was not very high.

I remember Scott sharing a "Tolkein name or pharma startup" buzzfeed quiz once in a monthly links post that was almost impossible for anyone who wasn't both a pharmacist and a Silmarillion fan

I understand that drug names are not necessarily intuitive and while they have some tricks those will be impenetrable to patients.

That said, you need to know what you take, when, how, and why - otherwise you are at significant risk of increased bad outcome (although this obviously depends on what conditions you have).

What we usually recommend the elderly do is have a sheet with that information written out and store it in your wallet so it becomes easier to read out, can be retrieved if you are not arousable and so on.

This advice is good for anybody however.

With respect to this specific patient - we see a class of older men who have a large number of medical problems and put no effort into understanding what those are for, what they are doing about them, how to avoid making them worse and so on. While some of these people are stubborn or anti-medication most just have very low conscientiousness. Not ideal for a first time gun buyer at 80 something.

while they have some tricks those will be impenetrable to patients.

I know that if the ending of the name is the queen of the fae, it's going to be really fucking expensive.

Yes and just like queen mab,* contact with them can be quite hazardous.

I do enjoy the "deck the halls with beta blockers olol, olol, olol, olol" joke.

*Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs).

The hearing was supposed to be for expunging his commitment. People don't get committed for forgetting their medication. It's not supposed to be "is there anything wrong with him such that we don't want him to have a gun" even though the state used it that way.

Commitment hearings are tricky, often there is some type of collusion between the judge and both lawyers. This is because 99/100 the situation is super obvious.

I imagine (as RovScam points out) that the everyone involved quickly identified this guy as a full of shit asshole and they went this way to avoid wasting everyone's time.

It isn't great - and I'm a very strong 2A advocate, but when you see the circumstances that result in admission you realize almost nobody who has been involuntarily should be allowed near a fire arm.

It's like prison. Are some people in prison under false pretenses? Sure. Do they almost all clearly deserve to be in prison. Yup, and it's obvious after five minutes working in a forensic setting.

It isn't great - and I'm a very strong 2A advocate, but when you see the circumstances that result in admission you realize almost nobody who has been involuntarily should be allowed near a fire arm.

Can you elaborate? What's the minimum requirement for involuntary admission, and how much margin do you think there is between that level of dysfunction (or vulnerability to manipulation) and the level of dysfunction that disqualifies one from responsible gun ownership? What if we remove suicide as a consideration?

I will freely admit that sometimes places are a little "soft" with commitment (or lazy) but in general (and uniformly in busier places because resources are scarce) systems are very good at following the law, which varies by state by state.

In essence though the idea is the person needs to be a danger to themselves or others. The way that works out in practice is significant, imminent danger. You might say you have suicidal thoughts, but unless you have a plan and a situation which makes implementing that plan easy and likely then you'll get sent home.

When it comes to homicidal thought content its not "i'm going to kill my wife" its "I went out an bought a gun because I want to kill my wife because she is cheating on me" (and she is not in fact cheating, that's a delusion).

Putting aside the suicide end of things, you basically have to be having something (psychiatric) going on in your life that makes you likely to kill somebody. That gets taken seriously because a lot of these people don't get caught and end up murder suiciding, killing people, and doing things that end up in the news. Getting treatment on board or removing guns from the equation when they present themselves is huge.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Even with that in mind some people do get discharged from the (medical) hospital after a suicide attempt. When done properly (which is admittedly sticky) the burden for commitment is high. On the homicidal end of things you can credibly be planning to shoot up a school but if it's not psychiatric in nature...off you go (although some will make exceptions for this for the obvious reasons).

Inability to care for oneself is part of the assessment but that almost only comes up with people like chronic schizophrenics who can't feed themselves and so on.

Basically the idea is that (like with a felony) you've had an event that's so bad that it greatly contorts your actuarial risk of bad behavior such that abridgment of your personal rights is appropriate in order to protect others. That's fundamentally what a commitment IS, so taking away guns is not far off from a commitment itself.

and I'm a very strong 2A advocate

If you claim to be a strong 2A advocate yet your reasoning keeps leading to people not being allowed to keep and bear arms, you are not actually a strong 2A advocate.

I believe a normal person should not have their rights abridged.

However, I believe a convicted murderer shouldn't be allowed to have guns. That's pretty common sense (although I'm sure some disagree), in the same way that I am strongly pro-1A but don't want a nuclear scientist giving detailed instructions to ...certain kinds of people.

Some carve outs should be allowed.

Some people shouldn't own guns.

Another clear category is schizophrenics. Once you get the schizophrenia diagnosis (assuming it is well formulated, which it may not be) then you should never ever allowed to own guns because you don't know what is real and that makes you a huge risk to yourself or others.

If you are involuntarily admitted to the hospital that means at some point you were a imminent serious risk to self or others (thats more or less the commitment criteria in most states), and while some people have one episode and then they are done, generally that is not the case. The risk calculus is instantly much different (sidebar: if you believe people have a right to end their own lives even when they have a potentially modifiable medical or psychiatric condition then this changes the calculus significantly).

While they do get it wrong some times the vast vast majority of committed people have some combination of a. incredibly serious mental illness. b. credible suicidality or homicidality. c. are an absolutely enormous asshole.

Society is almost certainly better off restricting the rights of those three kinds of people and doing so results in less death and crime.

Important to note is that you can sue for inappropriate involuntary commitment and that this is a major cause of malpractice claims. The opportunity to defend yourself from malfeasance is there. Yes psychiatrists have notoriously cheap malpractice insurance.

I believe a normal person should not have their rights abridged.

And a "normal person" will never have seen a mental health professional, will never have been confused about the names of his medications, will have three friends willing to swear he's moral enough to buy a firearm, etc, etc. In fact, perhaps a "normal person" wouldn't want a gun at all.

No. If you want to be a strong advocate of the Second Amendment, you must think those carveouts must be small and strongly limited. Carving out those convicted of a felony is OK. Carving out those who some psychiatrist once thought wasn't in such great shape is not. Carving out those who aren't socially connected enough to get people to vouch for them is not. Yeah, this is really hard, because it means some people who you probably don't want having a gun will (if you get your way) lawfully be able to get one whether you like it or not, but that's part of the cost of being a strong Second Amendment advocate.

Important to note is that you can sue for inappropriate involuntary commitment and that this is a major cause of malpractice claims. The opportunity to defend yourself from malfeasance is there. Yes psychiatrists have notoriously cheap malpractice insurance.

Sure, who are the courts going to believe, the psychiatrist or the crazy person?

More comments

That said, you need to know what you take, when, how, and why - otherwise you are at significant risk of increased bad outcome (although this obviously depends on what conditions you have).

Quick, what blood thinner are you on? Adoxaban? No, I'm sorry, it's apixaban, no gun for you.

It's usually more like "do you have any medical problems" "no" "any history of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes?" "no" "what are these scars for" "Oh I had a triple bypass in 2003 and I'm on 8 medications for all that."

A further complication is the difference between brand names and generic names. I generally know the names of my prescription medications by the generic name, because that's what the pharmacy prints on the labels. However, every doctor I've ever seen refers to drugs by the brand name (which is usually easier to say).

Yeah, I know exactly what type of gun owner the plaintiff would be, and its not good. One of those times when you wish this would be kept quite and the family could step in with a quiet word.

Reading between the lines (and using some experience with the interaction between medicine and the legal system) my suspicion is that the court and multiple involved parties are aware of this and are more or less working together to block this guy in a paternalistic but likely ultimately wise way.

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