Should mental defectives be identified?

[JCF]

If we are going to take away people's RIGHTS we may as well ban driver's license privileges to everyone because we all know they are way more likely to be in a car crash and they may kill someone someday.

Many jurisdictions restrict persons with severe and uncontrolled mental illness from driving. Download your state D/L application and take a look at the "yes/no" "have you" questions that they ask you. Your license can be revoked on the same basis.

 

[Mumwaldee]

I wonder how many fatal car crashes last year involved the mentally ill.

 

[Geister]

complete and utter disregard that a Naked, Body painted 23 year old taken into custody by Police for standing in a Park Screaming about the Aliens trying to probe him, should be able to buy a firearm since he has commited no crime to indicate he is a danger to self or others.

Why do you even care? Has he committed any sort of crime to you? Do you feel much safer with that guy being denied a firearm purchase instead of you being allowed to carry on a school campus or other normally victim disarment zone?

I don't see a huge epidemic of deranged psychopaths buying guns and using them to kill, do you? A psychopath can just as easily use a car or a machete.

My point goes beyond mental health; I simply say that the government does not have any authority to regulate who can own a firearm based on what somebody might do with it.

The Second Amendment was written for a reason, folks.

 

[JCF]

You agreed that (your words here) "Of individuals who do sexually offend, a high proportion have been victims of sexual abuse."... My point was, do we now lock-up those that have been abused as children, simply because (again, YOUR words) "Of individuals who do sexually offend, a high proportion have been victims of sexual abuse."...

We lock up the ones that demonstrate abusive behavior. Once released, we frequently proactively restrict them from contact with the target of their preference.

With the severly mentally ill, we lock up the ones that demonstrate dangerous behavior. Once released, the proposal is that we proactively restrict them from lawfully accessing firearms.

What portion of the mentally ill commit violent crimes as opposed to those individuals that commit the same crimes but have not been deemed "menatally ill"??

Of the overall mental health population... very few. Of the population in question, viz., those diagnosed severely mentally ill with accompanying expressions and displays of aggression toward others and prior hospitalizations for same... an exceptionally high proportion relative to the overall population.

Have you found the number?

Thanks for going slow.

 

[Art Eatman]

"I simply say that the government does not have any authority to regulate who can own a firearm based on what somebody might do with it."

Sorry, Geister, but the people who called for and who wrote the Second Amendment also wrote views that are 180 degrees opposed to yours. It's in the Anti-Federalist Papers; the right to bear arms is to be denied to "the insane and those of ill repute". Ill repute, back then = felons, now.

And this thread, while having some good points, has wandered way off the topic way too often.

If somebody wishes to restart, and those responding can remained focussed, fine. I think we'd be better served to use a title on the order of "Dangerously Mentally Incompetent", however.

Art