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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.
The process is somewhat individual and adversarial. In NJ the way it works is more or less this - somebody has to be concerned about the patient (usually a family member, a concerned bystander, cops walking by) the patient is then taking an ED or Crisis Center on a temporary hold, at which point a social worker has to see them and think they need to be committed at which point they are seen by two physicians who have to feel it is appropriate. Individuals involved can be sued, fined, lose their license for abuse and so on. Then afterwards there is an expungement process. If the patient is held for an extended period of time without discharge then they have a formal court hearing that can and will result in release from the psychiatric hospital.
Obviously there is some abuse and laziness in the process, most typically the second physician would be like "eh I wasn't there, I'll assume the first doc was correct."
Ultimately this involves multiple trained professionals with skin in the game to make the determination that someone needs to be committed and they can always go through a court process afterwards.
I think some of the value here is that most people who end up committed don't have the functional status to do much of anything. If you make it opt-in most wouldn't, and wouldn't be able to get expunged. I'm fine with a more robust way of people getting their rights back but it has to be done in away that isn't too egregiously expensive and defaults to no because of how dangerous a small subsection of these people are, which is hard to convey if you've never seen them.
Crisis centers do occasionally catch people who will explicitly say that they are interested in killing people (in a sociopathic way) and loading them down with rights restrictions before they get started in an unalloyed good.
Hope all of that makes sense, typed fast.
Some other stuff: -While most doctors aren't anti-gun they aren't committing people purely to get them away from their guns unless the doc has concerns for threat and its therefore appropriate. This is because these settings are overworked, their aren't enough beds for those who really need them, and the hospital doesn't get paid if the insurance company doesn't think the patient actually needs to be committed and that rolls onto the doctor's head. In the worse case scenario no psychiatric hospital will take the committed patient because they clearly don't need psychiatric care and then the ED comes over and stabs the psychiatrists 80 million times for taking up a bed while someone is bleeding to death in chairs.
-Average disorganized street homeless person is harmless other than the inability to care for themselves even if they are vaguely threatening, so they tend not to get taken in unless they are actively harassing someone or committing some other crime like trespassing.
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