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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22365 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?

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.

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