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That's the proposal. The answer to "I know this guy is going to do something bad but I can't prove it in court, so I want to take away his rights anyway" is "no". That's true whether it's liberty, speech, or guns.
That sounds like a plan. That sounds like you want this to be adjudicated in court instead. Explore that! Examine the consequences! Thank about it! Is it better? Worse?
I haven't seen good faith engagement from you in ages in this conversation. You clearly imply that some infringements on the right to bear arms is reasonable but you don't want to admit what that is then you later try and imply that you don't. Those are incompatible and you must pick.
Yes, I've said that an infringement is reasonable if it's a process similar to a felony conviction. And I've said that involuntary commitment is nothing like that. You keep telling me that then I have to solve the problem of people who were involuntarily committed and released buying guns and killing people, or accept that involuntary commitment loses gun rights. And I keep telling you that no, I do not have to solve that problem; that some bad people will get guns is an unavoidable consequence of having a right to keep and bear arms.
So you want to pay the taxes required to run a criminal grade trial on everyone who is involuntary committed so that they can have their guns taken away by a jury of their peers. This would be expensive in a pure trial sense and because it would be slow people would be held unnecessarily - if you can go home after 4 days because the medication worked but you need to stay in the hospital (or be dispo'ed to jail/prison) for ....however many weeks to months it takes to hold an actual trial.... isn't that a worse violation of your rights?
I have repeated this over and over.
If you take gun rights seriously you can
Leave him his guns or
Subject him to trial by jury of his peers.
That doing the first may result in more danger to other people does not rule it out.
Our judicial system is predicated on people not actually going to trial these days. Are you willing to accept the increased cost in taxes to do this, or more likely - a coercive structure that would necessitate a "plea deal equivalent." If so how much financial drain on society is acceptable to you?
What is special about jury trials over other processes? If someone does a bench trial is that acceptable? If a judge rubber stamps a psychiatrists recommendation (the likely outcome of a push for a trial process) is that acceptable? How do you want this to actually happen? This is not a simple logistical thing you are suggesting.
Being involuntarily committed requires some level of poor judgement and insight and lack of responsibility. Sometimes it is obviously disqualifying "I'm going to kill my neighbor doc" sometimes it is debatably disqualifying "I'm going to kill myself doc" (as feelings on suicide are complicated, even if our society has staked a view on this topic) sometimes it is something more like "I need you to calm down so I can help discharge you" "fuck you bitch cunt go fuck yourself" (in the setting of clear threat to self or others). A pro-2A MAXIMALIST might have no problem with someone who is overtly dangerous, foul tempered, and irresponsible owning a gun. Fine.
BUT.
You need a plan for individuals who are extremely likely to commit violence. Some patients are likely (where likely could means something like 30-70, not a baseline 2% risk of committing a murder) to commit violence. An example is ongoing escalatory stalking and harassment behavior. Seizing their guns and/or preventing them from buying guns gives the victim options while other social processes (like moving away, a restraining order and violations of the same leading to jail time) come into play.
What do you want to do to prevent Nybbler killing man from killing you. He gets discharged by the judge from the Psych hospital because he hasn't attacked anyone in the hospital. The Psychiatrist has a duty to warn by law to tell you hey I think this guy is at high risk of killing you. Guy goes home, everyone knows he is going to go kill you, how do you stop him? If you call the police they'll say "has he done anything yet?" or maybe "file a restraining order." That's shitty.
This is not theoretical. I've seen patient situations similar to this where the whole hospital goes "shit that guy is going to kill someone" but we can't do anything about it. Then we read about it on the news or treat the victim.
That's with the current state. It gets worse with guns involved.
This is a common sense restriction.
I suspect your issue is of the cathedral and woke politics - you don't trust Psychiatrists to appropriately judge if someone is really in need of an involuntary commitment. I'm sure they get it wrong sometimes just like felony convictions, but:
Can you produce any evidence that people getting guns being taken away from them because of involuntary commitment inappropriately is occurring with any degree of frequency?
Orthogonal. People who plead guilty to felonies still get their rights taken away, just as people who are convicted at trial do.
It actually doesn't, as in the case I know where someone took a prescribed drug which caused psychotic symptoms. But even if that were so, a lot of things do. Showing some level of poor judgement and insight and lack of responsibility is not per se grounds for revoking a fundamental right.
No, I actually don't. I do not need to create a group of second-class citizens who are allowed to do anything any normal citizen can do EXCEPT buy them a gun, and assign people to that group on the word of a group of medical professionals. I simply don't. And if you really were a strong advocate of the Second Amendment and were serious about the right to keep and bear arms, you wouldn't either. But instead, to you, while liberty of person is something that shouldn't just be taken away so lightly, guns are. So you are not a strong advocate of the Second Amendment.
If I weren't in New Jersey, I could shoot him when he shows up. Not 100% chance of success, but better than if he's coming to stab me and I'm unarmed.
And that is what all the gun-grabbers say.
I don't think we are going to get on the same page about this, but as a fact matter - if your friend was psychotic under the influence of a substance at that time he had poor judgement and insight, if they were committed involuntary (the correct response to oh holy shit the walls are talking to me is to you know, get help).
One of the challenges of managing society in general is what to do with people who are "fine" most of the time but dangerous while in a certain state (like decompensated mental illness, tripping balls, or just pissed off).
Someone experiencing a psychotic episode is often not aware that they are no longer aligned with reality. They are experiencing not just hallucinations but delusions. Yes, obviously they have "poor judgement and insight" while actually experiencing the psychotic episode; that's not reason to deprive them of fundamental rights forever.
That's pretty much everyone.
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That's fine and all, but if that's your attitude you'll probably lose in the long run. If the demonstrably dangerous and mentally unstable having easy access to guns is just one of the risks one has to incur to have gun rights, it seems obvious that more people will decide that gun rights aren't worth protecting.
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I'd like the guy to go home to his guns after the medication works. This is a lesser violation of his rights than either option you have presented and no more complicated or expensive than the current system.
I can't speak for Nybbler but I read his comments as indicating he wants the same.
Frequently (by no means all the time but often enough) that's grossly insufficient.
-Some patients remain essentially untreated. You don't need to take medication (there is however a slow process for forcing patients who are sufficiently dangerous). Nybbler murder patient may in fact want to murder no-one other than Nybbler, and behave more or less while in the hospital while refusing treatment. After the initial period further involuntary commitment involves a judge - the judge may say "well he hasn't done anything bad since he got here, maybe he won't murder Nybbler?" and off he goes. Walks out of the hospital, buys the gun, murder goes. This is not theoretical, it happens (sometimes even with mass shooting events but does also show up in the local news when the death count is low). Solution: force people to get treatment without their consent. Or force them to stay in the hospital until they consent. Both are significantly more rights destroying.
-Some patients are only dangerous when they use drugs. While intoxicated and for a while after they are a psychiatric problem but outside that the health care system has no control over them. People who keep smoking PCP and want to murder people while on PCP should probably not be allowed to own guns. This should be fixed by arresting people who use and sell PCP but society isn't really electing to do this these days. Solution: reengage the war on drugs. Not a popular option.
-Much more common and much trickier is that it is common for people to be committed, accept treatment, temporarily get better, and then relapse. They then become a threat again. Sometimes quite quickly. Much more quickly than any court process would go. Charitably (and in truth pretty commonly) this happens because medication works well at reducing things like hallucination and aggression but not the negative symptoms lack apathy and avolition. When your symptom is that you can't be motivated to take medication and you don't care if the other symptoms come back, well then it is hard to stay on medication. And then the risk comes back.
Making a public and credible threat to murder someone for reasons that are universally not given as acceptable (ex: for no reason at all or for reasons of delusion) should be exclusionary to owning guns. We aren't talking for political reasons or because the neighbor slept with your wife, we are talking because you are convinced the neighbor is Proxima Centauri.
Nybbler's issue seems to be (although he won't clarify it) that it didn't go through a legal proceeding. But opening up legal proceedings is a huge can of worms.
Let's say someone (police, healthcare worker, concerned person, whatever) can open a complaint about someone's safety to own weapons. That's time consuming, expensive, might involve temporarily seizing guns or the person, will involve litigating if expression of political beliefs counts... way more abusable than present state.
The fact of the matter is that the vast vast majority of people who are involuntarily committed* really should not be allowed to own guns. Failures are rare. Should you find one (for instance someone who did a shit ton of PCP for ten years and then spent 50 years not using PCP and wants some guns) the expungement process works pretty well.
The modal involuntary patient isn't actually suicidal or homicidal, instead they are something like a schizophrenic who is so severe they just can't feed or care for themselves. Someone that disorganized isn't safe to own anything remotely dangerous, and if they had the financial ability to own a car (most don't) they probably shouldn't.
*assuming you agree with the suicide end of things, that's a bit trickier.
Why? You seem to be asserting that a risk of someone having a repeat episode while having a gun is unacceptable. I do not agree with this; disagreement with this is a primary reason behind why I'm against gun control. Freedom means authority figures should have neither the responsibility or authority to stop people from making shit decisions.
I agree this person is not safe to let out with guns, but the guns are irrelevant. The person you describe is not safe to let out, full stop. Not with guns or a car or even just their own fists.
I do have disagreements regarding the place of suicidal people here, but I'll put those aside.
I don't trust that all of this is the case currently or that it will remain the case. The particular case described in the OP already does not look like the expungement process working well and I do not expect this to improve. There is a large group standing right behind your reasonable safety concerns who wants any possible excuse to keep guns away from people, and given your previous top-level post I'm sure you're well aware that doctors' politics lean heavily towards that group.
You're thinking of this system in the hands of an impartial party. I am expecting this system to be in the hands of an anti-gun crusader sooner or later and want it hardened against misuse.
Would you feel more comfortable with this process if we were able to produce date that illustrates that patients admitted with homicidal ideation are equally or more likely to kill someone as felons?
Fundamentally we need to establish what level of problematic behavior disqualifies from gun use. Some amount is clearly appropriate there are people dumb or crazy enough to say "if you let me have a gun I'm going to kill X." Clearly they shouldn't be allowed to. Felons? Stickier not every felon is likely to kill someone but it's a good broad category. You could attack this laterally by making assault on healthcare workers a felony and charging it 100% of the time, but that would be even more overkill - it happens a lot and we try and let it go because a good number of people who do this aren't likely to cause trouble or are likely to cause a minimum of trouble.
While my co-workers (of most non-surgical specialties) are certainly politically motivated at times, and are unlikely to write a letter in support of someone owning guns because they don't believe in that for political reasons....and at the same time they aren't going to abuse the commitment process for political reasons. I could say its because of historical abuses leading to lots of ethic changes on this, I could say its because of the increased lawsuit risk, but realistically a large chunk of it is just because it's so infrequently anything other than intensely obvious (at least outside suicide, suicide risk gets a bit stickier).
Patients who are sick tend to be really fucking sick and unless you've seen it it's hard to understand. Your usual crazy schizophrenic homeless person wandering around on the street was deemed safe to go home. How bad do you think the ones who get dragged in are?
This seems to be a more specific group than previously discussed, so I'm not sure why data on them would matter to a discussion of involuntarily admitted patients as a whole. I also do not agree with rights being removed at a statistical level. Temporary violations of rights without due process are unfortunately necessary, but for a more permanent removal a just system requires an individual and adversarial process.
I'm more concerned about the (lack of) process here, but given it's a right I'd accept taking guns away at the same level which would justify locking them up for an extended time. If you wouldn't feel comfortable tossing them in a jail cell for their behavior I don't think it's bad enough to take their guns either.
Leading doctors in the US recently tried to distribute scarce health resources (covid-19 vaccines) by race. If that was non-political then non-political covers a lot I would consider political. I am concerned that some doctors will involuntarily admit a person for the purpose of getting them away from their guns long-term (i.e. past the immediate episode), and your word isn't sufficient to convince me that they aren't willing to do this.
I was under the impression these people do tend to get occasionally dragged in and involuntarily committed, then are eventually let go again.
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