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