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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.
Where do you get off the train?
-Involuntary commitments are always correct.
-The type of people who are involuntary committed are not safe to own guns.
-Even if both of those true, you need a trial to take the guns away.
If the problem is the third option, how much are you willing to pay to facilitate that? Are you willing to have people temporarily held in custody in some form until after the hearing, because they've been tentatively described as someone who can't have guns for safety reasons but they can't be taken yet?
Your frustration with overall NJ gun laws (which are braindead) make it easy to miss Chesterton's fence, the alternatives are force.
If the problem is the first part, well fair, but they are probably similarly level of correctness to felony charges and that stuff.
If the problem is the second part...you need to encounter some people who are being committed.
Overall I think that would change your view right quick.
I'm already off the train.
Certainly many of the type of people who are involuntarily committed are not safe to own guns. However, I know one person who was involuntarily committed as a result of a drug reaction (to prescription drugs); while the commitment may have been correct at the time, they certainly shouldn't have their gun rights taken away forever.
Yes. Taking someone's constitutional rights away, especially on a lasting or even permanent basis, is a Big Deal. It shouldn't be done without a trial.
We already have this; the problem is that just being held means they lose their gun rights forever.
The relevant fence is Schelling's, not Chesterton's. There isn't one on this slope, as the NJ gun laws demonstrate. And when I bring up NJ gun laws, the first argument from many "2A advocates" I get is "they aren't the way you say". If I demonstrate they are, the answer is "good". That's not being a 2A advocate.
This is not about NJ gun laws this is about the more general involuntary commitment process.
How do you want to prevent people who want to hurt themselves or others from owning firearms?
If you don't like the current state what do you want instead?
For other rights we prohibit people from abusing them (see: restrictions on free speech such as harassment).
It's not about the more general involuntary commitment process. It's about whether entering into that process should carry the same stigma as a felony conviction with respect to gun rights.
We don't, however, take away their typewriters, computers, or pen and paper.
You have not proposed an alternative.
If your neighbor goes off of his medication and keeps following you around as you leave your house saying "Nybbler you raped me, I'm going to shoot you."
What do you want to do with this guy? Sure you could get him committed, but he'll be admitted, get stabilized, go home and go off his meds again and then go buy a gun and shoot you.
Especially in NJ the cops won't get involved because it is clearly a psychiatric matter not a criminal one.
I have identified the problem.
The legal system in many places in the U.S. has abandoned intervention when a problem is a psychiatric matter and not a criminal one. Some of this is clearly inappropriate such as situations where the police are exhausted or the DA refuses to get involved. Sometimes it is appropriate, if someone is a chronic schizophrenic who has lost touch with reality and is violent then it's not a criminal problem, the guy is obviously not guilty by reason of insanity.
The person does not belong in jail they belong in a state hospital, this issue in part being that the funding for those beds has been taken away so traditionally these days they go to jail instead (it's just not the correct disposition).
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