Article on Right to Bear Arms and Mental Health

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Treatment for mental illness has become increasingly more difficult to obtain over the last few decades. Since the 70s, we have closed the majority of psychiatric institutions in this country. In addition, personal and group health policies have seriously scaled back and limited comprehensive coverage for mental health issues because inpatient care is expensive. County and other local psych units have had their budgets cut and it is near impossible to get timely treatment or an emergency admission. The System is broken primarily due to economic reasons. I work in a field where I see this on a regular basis and I hear a lot of, “I wish we could help you, but ...” It's no coincidence that this problem has escalated with the shift from “not-for-profit” to “for-profit” heath care insurers.

Our healthcare system gives lip service to preventative care and doesn't address mental health issues until they've escalated to a critical level. It's cheaper and easier to blame the tool that the psychopath uses to create his carnage than it is to have foreseen the potential and proactively treated it.
 
The problem is, how do you know the person is mentally ill? You can only tell that if they have been examined -- and lots of people who are mentally ill don't even attempt to get treatment.

Next, if you penalize people for seeking treatment, even fewer will seek it.

This is a "solution" that makes he problem worse.
 
"Mental health" is their avenue of attack. Gun owners are the new Jews and they will use "mental health" to lightly restrict who can buy guns. Once they get universal background checks, they will tighten the "mental health" requirements to progressively reduce the number of "qualified" gun owners over the next few decades.
 
From what I know most of the Psychiatric Hospitals that were closed were closed for questionable medical practices and violating patients civil rights.

Just my .02,
LeonCarr
 
You're absolutely right. If you were accused of serial murder, you had a right to a trial, a defense attorney, and even after conviction, you had certain rights.

If you were accused of being mentally unstable, you had none of those rights -- and they kept you drugged and semi-incoherent for the rest of your life.
 
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Here's what I'm worried about -- there may come a day (and it may not be very far off) when merely being interested in guns, in and of itself, will be considered a symptom of mental illness. Already, in certain social circles, gun people are by definition labeled "nuts" and "kooks." That would be the perfect Catch-22 from the point of view of the antis: if you want a gun, then that's conclusive proof that you can't have it.
 
Caught this in the NYTimes today also. More hand-wringing via cherry-picked examples of how gun owners with mental illnesses (or manifesting behaviors that appear to be symptoms of such) are dealt with and the differences between states and their varrious laws/policies and threasholds for disarming the involved citizens. Nothing to make light of from any perspective of course, and makes some points in a minor way~ but the implicit conclusion is the need for national uniform policy in this area and the creation of yet another prohibited group. Of course I didn't see much about my home state where any medical office can have a patients' FOID card pulled for little to nothing more than its say so with no civil liability. But I digress.....
 
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