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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.
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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.
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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.
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