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No. "the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practitioner you have ever seen, since birth". Not anywhere you've been involuntarily committed. Any mental health practitioner, you have seen, over your entire lifespan. Talk to a licensed MHP as a high school guidance counselor, and it's technically required. And you have to sign a disclosure request so they can ask hospitals actively.
(Bonus: any errors in an application, even honest mistakes, can be and are used to on their own act as sufficient cause to reject a permit to purchase.)
New Jersey does run its own Point of Contact system including a mental health database. They just also require active disclosure of everything else, too.
((New Jersey, by statute, also prohibits firearm permits from being issued to anyone with a voluntary mental health commitment, though that's not relevant here except to show it's also more aggressive than Florida in stupid ways.))
The specific New Jersey requirement's legal challenges have been bound up by some case consolidation and standing
delatory tacticsproblems, but we do have other circuits who have looked at those policies and decided they were a-OK. My personal favorite is Antonyuk, where the character references survived because there was an imaginable circumstance where they could be constitutionally applied, and because buying and gun and possessing a gun are different. So the challenge has been live since 2022, the district court's stay of other parts of the law that were blatantly unconstitutional was reflexively stayed and never went into effect.SCOTUS booted the case there back down, without any process protecting the plaintiff's rights in the meantime, and given Rahimi, very little chance of the Second Circuit changing their minds or New Jersey behaving any better. SCOTUS doesn't care. It's not a random illegal-immigrant with a human trafficking background on a holiday weekend.
His primary stopping point is the disclosure requirement; he does not have those names of professionals. Beyond that, many jurisdictions will actively refuse character references from out of county, and the law permits them to reject references arbitrarily.
I don't see where you're getting "in private" from, but the trivial and poor debunking would be to say "that didn't happen" or "there is no evidence of this claim", in their own writing. A stronger one would be something along the lines of "here's the trial transcript, it ain't in it".
I'm not asking you whether they'll have a perfect debunk. I'm predicting -- and willing to bet at nontrivial odds -- that they're not going to try.
You're absolutely right in the sense that appeals court isn't going to care. They don't need to debate whether it happened. That's the process.
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