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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.
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?
Okay let me actually think about this deeply and come up with what I'd consider acceptable policy.
I figure felony and involuntary commitment should be considered around the same in terms of severity (we'll come back to this).
This means default to no for gun acquisition for people in those categories. People deserve rights including the right not to be limited in their behavior when possible, however other individuals deserve the right to be free of molestation and incidents of bad behavior skyrocket once you look at the pot of the population that are felons or involuntarily committed. Schizophrenics crime rates are lower than many might anticipate but this is in part driven by underreporting and the most heinous crimes in society are committed by violent psychotics, both of those facts should be kept in mind.
Both involuntary commitment and felony charges get misused. Trump is now a felon. A patient who was diagnosed with cancer at age 19, made a credible attempt to end their own life in the setting of that stressor but then survives and has no further interaction with mental health care? Yeah seems like both of those shouldn't be limited.
Therefore there should be an adversarial process to get permission to own a gun again (like an expungement hearing). Yes this puts a time and financial burden on people to regain their rights but they lost them for good reason and the majority of people who go through either of those are appropriately labeled.
Okay so why does this guy not deserve his gun? Well: involuntarily committed. Reading between the lines looks like for good reason at the time despite his protestations to the contrary. Now he also appears somewhat disorganized, likely has mild cognitive impairment and has poor judgement (why was he not organized in his defense? Where's the lawyer? He admits he is lying to healthcare professionals...). It's not unreasonable to assume the guy is full of shit. Navigating expert witness testimony, dealing with HIPAA and subpoenas and all the good stuff is time consuming and expensive, likely it would establish that the guy was lying about ongoing psychiatric care and the reason for his admission, the judge skipped ahead and tried to look for a justification and found one. If the guy hired a lawyer he'd be fine.
For basic rights the idea is probably that both the responsible and irresponsible are supposed to have them (and that includes 2A even though the latter part of that scares people). But once you've gone through the first "hit" it seems reasonable to make the standard now be that you have to be responsible. This guy clearly fails to establish that he is now responsible.
Okay back to why Invol and Felony should be labeled as similar faults.
Maybe the best way to make this case is to look back at one of your other points: "Sure, who are the courts going to believe?"
Most medical schools give students a chance to witness (continued) commitment hearings during the psychiatric clerkship.
Here's how it goes:
Public defender: Don't talk. If you don't talk the judge will let you go.
Patient: Okay.
Judge: Let's begin, on the matter of...
Patient: I DO NOT RESPECT THE COURT'S AUTHORITY THE JUDGE WORKS FOR THE NORTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT AND HE RAPED ME LAST NIGHT.
Public defender: "..."
Their are absolutely doctors and facilities that are soft in their commitments but especially in large urban areas you'll see patients get discharged with situations like:
-"I'm going to go home and kill myself" (16 year old and parents say they can go home safely)
-"I'm going to shoot up the school" (criminal/police matter not a psychiatric one if no pathology is present)
-Patient who won't speak to anyone in the facility because they think everyone works for the CIA but takes steps to shower, eat, and sleep.
Involuntary stays are usually appropriate.
What complicates matters in the public imagination is that most conditions that lead to commitment involve some impairment of insight so when they complain on the internet they withhold details and context and make it seem like they were abused by the system.
Once you start doing balancing tests like this -- "What's the potential of harm if we let the applicant have a gun" -- you're not really talking about a right.
Felony and involuntary committment are quite different. Felony conviction is a judicial and adversarial process, and pretty damned heavyweight. Involuntary commitment can happen on the word of a cop and a doctor, or sometimes a family member and a doctor. No hearing, no advocate against commitment for the patient. Taking away someone's rights for involuntary commitment isn't anything like taking them away for felony conviction; it's like taking them away for any arrest.
(and of course NJ makes voluntary commitment, by which they mean any treatment in a psychiatric facility, and also involuntary outpatient treatment, a permanent bar to gun ownership)
I don't support this.
For the rest of this, well you have a trained professional (in the case of NJ I believe it's two physicians spread out over multiple days) assessing that the person is a threat to themselves or others, and importantly staking their license on it - since they can be sued for this, and with other release valves like the expungement process.
That's not quite the same as a conviction in a court of law by a jury of your peers but continued commitment processes do involve lawyers beyond the initial psychiatric hold.
Importantly the alternative is ass - does every temporary psychiatric hold involve the legal system? Does that mean you need to hold people after they are already better in order to get them to court? The administrative and procedural cost would be high. Most patient's would find being dragged through court by default traumatizing and miserable.
The majority of people committed have either attempted suicide or have a condition that permanently makes them a significant threat to themselves or others (like schizophrenia and bipolar I). While edge cases do exist it is not generally subtle.
Ultimately people have a right to free speech and guns (in the U.S. anyway) but other people have a right to not get killed.
I'll freely admit that the rest of New Jersey's gun control stuff is absolute horseshit, but preventing someone who thinks that everyone on the street is spying on them for Elon Musk and going to rape them from owning weapons is legit.
A "trained professional" is not the same as an adversarial process. A police officer is a trained professional, for instance.
NJ allows for at least a 3-day involuntary commitment with no court order, just on the word of a health facility, and 6 days in many circumstances. Then they can be held up to 20 days on an ex parte court order. Only then does the patient get an actual hearing. Any of this disqualifies you from gun ownership in NJ.
And though some of this can be sued over, the burden of proof is then on the patient to prove the commitment was unreasonable. And even that doesn't restore gun rights.
If you want it to take away legal rights, especially permanently, it sure as hell ought to.
And if you want to claim to be a strong 2A advocate, you need to accept that this sometimes means accepting that people that you'd look at and say "Naa, that guy shouldn't have a gun" have gun rights too. Otherwise you end up rationalizing yourself (as many "conservatives" do) into finding even NJs gun laws to be perfectly OK.
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