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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Taking rights away from a mentally ill person should require an adversarial hearing where the person accused of being mentally ill has the right to bring evidence, cross-examine witnesses, etc. If there hasn't been such a hearing, and the law otherwise allows the boy to have a gun (which it sounds like it does), requiring people to keep guns away from the "mentally ill" person is just a roundabout way to circumvent gun rights.

Nobody would accept a ruling that forced the boy into involuntary confinement without a hearing, even if failure to involuntarily confine him meant that he could, and eventually did, kill someone.

The law allowed him to have a gun under the supervision of his parents, which makes it pretty inherently reasonable to hold them responsible for his misuse of that gun.

But on the other hand, individual knowledge can make a difference.

If I sell my neighbor a gun, ordinarily, I'm fine. But if I've heard my neighbor talking about wanting to shoot his ex, and then he goes and does that with the gun I've sold him, I might be in trouble. I'm comfortable with there being some similar point at which parents are responsible not to let their teenager have a gun.

(Do these particular parents meet it? I don't know the facts well enough to confidently say.)