Lucky
April 19, 2007, 05:09 PM
First: Sanity or Insanity are legal terms, not medical terms, used to refer to a person suspected of crimes, and on trial. Do you want owning a gun to make you equivalent to a person on trial?
Second: Every medical test has a false-positive rate. None are perfect. Even the most accurate drug tests looking for specific compounds, in the most ideal circumstances, have false-positive rates. This means that out of a hundred sober people taking a drug test, a certain amount of them will test positive and the test will be wrong.
Imagine this applied to millions of gun owners; a 1% false-positive rate would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people. And there is NO mental test for sanity or insanity, those are legal terms used to discuss a CRIMINAL'S culpability. Any psychological tests using bureaucratic checklists will always be biased in favour of some group, and against others, it's inevitable.
Third: Forced psychological screening is an invasion of privacy. Your HEALTH is no-body's business but yours. Do they make HIV positive people walk around with a badge, so you can spot them? No, that would be a violation of their privacy. But singling out gun-owners would just set a precedent, and years later it would be possible to walk into a bar and see who has Herpes by their nametags.
Fourth: The FBI report released in 2006 made it extremely clear that someone going to commit a crime if never impeded by legal restrictions on acquiring firearms. Killers will always get the weapons they want.
I know there are people who are certified by medical personnel to be a threat to themselves or others, and that is just the borderline of what I'm willing to accept, for state imposing punishments on people who have not committed crimes, but even then there must be people like relatives who act in the patient's interest.
Second: Every medical test has a false-positive rate. None are perfect. Even the most accurate drug tests looking for specific compounds, in the most ideal circumstances, have false-positive rates. This means that out of a hundred sober people taking a drug test, a certain amount of them will test positive and the test will be wrong.
Imagine this applied to millions of gun owners; a 1% false-positive rate would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people. And there is NO mental test for sanity or insanity, those are legal terms used to discuss a CRIMINAL'S culpability. Any psychological tests using bureaucratic checklists will always be biased in favour of some group, and against others, it's inevitable.
Third: Forced psychological screening is an invasion of privacy. Your HEALTH is no-body's business but yours. Do they make HIV positive people walk around with a badge, so you can spot them? No, that would be a violation of their privacy. But singling out gun-owners would just set a precedent, and years later it would be possible to walk into a bar and see who has Herpes by their nametags.
Fourth: The FBI report released in 2006 made it extremely clear that someone going to commit a crime if never impeded by legal restrictions on acquiring firearms. Killers will always get the weapons they want.
I know there are people who are certified by medical personnel to be a threat to themselves or others, and that is just the borderline of what I'm willing to accept, for state imposing punishments on people who have not committed crimes, but even then there must be people like relatives who act in the patient's interest.
