medical community at FAULT......

[rmt22]

according to newsweek article NRA supports mental health adjudication info (Cho had magistrate adjudiate him a danger which would have denied him the gun if NRA recs were followed) going to FBI database but the medical community fights this


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18217741/site/newsweek/page/3/

But a source close to the gun lobby (who asked not to be identified because of the organization’s sensitivities about making any political points related to the tragedy), pointed out that pro-gun lobbyists and groups like the NRA have long supported adding all relevant mental-health records to background check databases. "We have no problem as long as one is adjudicated mentally incompetent [in denying gun purchases] and we have no problem with mental health records being part of the NICS," the source said. "The problem is not with the gun community. The problem is with the medical community" that has traditionally opposed making such records available on privacy grounds.

why does this NOT surprise me? The medical community continually gets a free pass on all the **** they are pulling on our country.

 

[NM234]

yeah, but what are they going on? I have no problem if someone is involuntarily committed and found to be a danger to themselves and others, but if you start bringing in peoples records who volunteer people who need help won't get it. And what if you go talk to a shrink (I don't say this to be rude, some help people, some just pass out meds like candy) because of some bad events in your life? Do they want to put that in too?

 

[rmt22]

if you go b/f a judge and he/she finds you a danger to yourself/community you SHOULD NOT be able to purchase a gun.

Cho would not have been able to legally purchase a gun under that standard.

 

[NM234]

well the judge sends you for an evaluation before doctors, if they find you NOT to be a danger to yourself or others then I think you should. Judges aren't doctors.

 

[romma]

if you go b/f a judge and he/she finds you a danger to yourself/community you SHOULD NOT be able to purchase a gun.

I do not disagree with this statement, however, if the lawmakers had more charge of evaluating a persons "danger" level, something tells me a lot more of us would end up in front of judges...

 

[NM234]

Also, what if the person has a curable form of mental illness? (Abraham Lincoln had a form of schizophrenia that can be cured/goes away, and he went on to be president) I'm just saying hypothetically (we are advancing rapidly in medicine) lets say you found someone to be mentally dangerous, but then were 100% sure they were cured, with proper medical documentation should they be allowed to buy a gun? I mean hell, felons can even apply to be forgiven in MA (probably the strictest state around) after 7 years out of prison and of parole of good behavior, so long as they aren't a sex offender (which I def. agree with, research has shown those to be the one set of crimes which it is generally impossible to rehabilitate the offender, the only reason I say generally is some of the crimes they are counting as sex offenses, I talked to my mother's friend and her son mooned someone and was registered as a sex offender in MA (I live in NH on the border)), and be given the right to purchase.

 

[The Cavalry]

No. The shooter is at fault, plain and simple. The medical community didn't pull the trigger.

On the other hand, if you were to assert that the medical community was an enabler...I'd strongly agree.

 

[rmt22]

I have handled numerous competency hearings (ct appointed attorney) and I can tell you this is NOT a wide net they throw around a large group of people. You are doing behavior that a normal person sees as disturbed.

As far as "curable" mental illness the reality is once a mental health problem presents itself to the point of you being dragged in front of a magistrate you should NEVER be able to purchase a gun, IMO.

I think you would find very little evidence that mental health problems are "cured." They are many times successfully "treated" through medication, and other means and those people lead relatively normal productive lives however to let someone purchase a gun is a serious undertaking.

The NRA appears to be right on point on this issue.

 

[hso]

The problem is that there are many young people that ask for help for depression and suicidal thoughts that get that help and have no problems for the rest of their lives. Unless there was a means to clear them showing the episode was temporary this would follow them the rest of their lives.

It's certainly essential that people like the massmurderer be blocked from legally purchasing a firearm, but the challenge is how do you categorize people and then recategorize them if they undergo a change.

 

[RavenVT100]

And what if you go talk to a shrink (I don't say this to be rude, some help people, some just pass out meds like candy) because of some bad events in your life? Do they want to put that in too?

Some states already do this. I have heard of people being denied for things like bereavement counseling because their family member had died. Imagine losing your family member and suffering further humiliation because you are now tagged as being "mentally ill" for having sought help.

I think you would find very little evidence that mental health problems are "cured." They are many times successfully "treated" through medication, and other means and those people lead relatively normal productive lives however to let someone purchase a gun is a serious undertaking.

So, you are saying that a person whose family member dies, or who suffered a severely traumatic event, now has an "incurable" mental health problem?

Are you being serious here?

What about the VT students who survived and have been referred to therapy in order to deal with this issue? Are they incurable now too and do they deserve to be permanently barred from ever owning a firearm?

What you are talking about is turning the act of getting help voluntarily into a de facto criminal record that will follow a person around forever. Once that is done, no one will ever voluntarily get help, because they know that they will be treated like a criminal for having done so.

 

[O C]

Mental Health

I am not a Doctor, nor did I stay at Holiday Inn. If we open up the door on the mental health issue, does it lend itself to abuse? In the Soviet Union, the mental health issue was used to send people away without proving a crime. I don't think this would be the case here, but it would allow for abuse by overacting courts and health officials. This is a very complicated thing and I don't trust a legislator to have the common sense to pass laws to allow this to happen ( declare someone mentally unfit to own a gun ). I have nightmares about being caught up in a legal mess like the one involving the Duke lacrosse players. Once they decide, it's for life! Let's be REAL careful here. FWIW O C

 

[yhtomit]

Hso is dead on.

I don't know if "everyone" is the right term, since a single counterexample would break the claim, but certainly many people go through some periods of despair. Whether it's ever described clinically as depression really isn't the point. Adolescents may go through months and months of serious funk, and so can people in any age range. (The elderly are notoriously subject to depression, too.)

The idea that we can know enough about someone's mental state to predict their actions is only sometimes justified well enough to deny them the right to self-defense on the grounds that they're likely to make others require that very right through their own aggression.

I doubt that most of the readers here would like to have an aggressive regime of "proper" mental health testing applied to all gun owners. I'm no pal of Scientology (and I'm by no means opposed to the practice of psychiatry in general), but the truth is that when it comes to variations from the norm, modern America is too eager to diagnose (and too eager to drug).

The current standard (adjudicated / involuntary commitment) doesn't strike me as especially bad; I don't have time at the moment to re-check this, but does the current standard allow for legal rehabilitation? That is, if it's found that really you were involuntarily committed by your evil scheming uncle who wanted to inherit the family fortune etc, can the legal adjudication be expunged / reversed? (My own uncle isn't evil, but being held mentally incompetent for illegitimate reasons is a nightmare scenario generally.)

I'd be very worried though if more stringent (not necessarily more "accurate" or well correlated) tests were contemplated; it really should take a sober and conservative judicial determination or something just as weighty. (I'm sure you don't want us Myers-Briggs INTJ types having guns, but I tell you, it's those crazy ENTJs who you ought to keep an eye on!) If someone looks at a Rohrshach ink blot and sees a nun, three penguins, and Cleveland, eh, I don't think that's got much bearing on his ability to sanely handle a gun -- maybe just a big imagination.

My point (not a new one in the world) is that psychiatry can be useful and in some cases even properly determinative, but that our knowledge of the human mind is so incomplete that we shouldn't fall into the trap of accepting things merely because they are "scientific." The danger is there of people being denied the right to self defense because they have "aggressive tendencies," or "sometimes display hostility."

timothy

 

[LaEscopeta]

Post #40 on the second page of this thread:

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=270877&page=2

...states the legal proceedings (temporary detention order, etc) against the Va. Tech murder do NOT count as declaring him legally mentaly ill, should not have been filed with the NICS, and should not have preventing him from legally buying a gun. I'm not an expert but that post makes sense to me. (And as stated in the post, weather he SHOULD have been committed at the time of the temporary detention order and psych. evaluation is a different matter.)

 

[Derek Zeanah]

according to newsweek article NRA supports mental health adjudication info (Cho had magistrate adjudiate him a danger which would have denied him the gun if NRA recs were followed) going to FBI database but the medical community fights this

The problem is that the NRA is willing to support all kinds of stuff like this. They're willing to be "reasonable," after all...

 

[mrmeval]

+1 Derek.

Also: Anyone who trusts a judge or a shrink should not be allowed to own guns.

 

[SomeKid]

I just did Mental Health Nursing this semester.

We went over what is needed to get an involuntary commitment to a Mental Health Institution, and all I can say is that it is easier to get involuntarily committed than it is to breathe. And no, I am not using hyperbole. It really is THAT easy. I am now fully committed to never letting a judge simply call you incompetent and remove your 2A rights.

The NRA is flat wrong (again) on this issue.

Regarding mental health records and what not, the problem is not mental illness. It is refusal by people to protect themselves, or failing that, a refusal by society to punish criminals. People won't call these vermin evil, they call them mentally ill.

This chick is dead on. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55296

 

[cosmonick]

I think that if a system was set up that could repeal someone's right to own firearms due to a mental condition, then there would also have to be an appeals system that involved mental health professionals. It would have to be flexible enough to address situations as mentioned above where someone sought help for any number of reason's and was later rehabilitated.

The scary part is where do you draw the line? If someone is depressed, but poses no threat to anyone, I don't think that they should be restricted like someone who is psychotic. Another problem is that you don’t want to discourage people from seeking the help that they need. I’m not nearly as nervous about the person who has sought counsel, than I am about the person who needs to seek help but refuses to do so or doesn’t realize they need help. It does seem that when someone has been forcibly taken to a mental institution for evaluation, red flags need to go up.

There was a situation in Indianapolis were a lady called the police because her live-in 33 year old son was making her nervous. The police picked him up, took him to a mental hospital and confiscated his guns. After his release, he filed application to have his firearms returned. Apparently he was schizophrenic, which I wonder if the doctor's were even required to tell the police (I know very little about how the right to privacy affects these situations). Seven months later the guy went on a shooting spree. It seems to me that there should be something in place to at least not obligate police to rearm someone who is very troubled.

http://home1.gte.net/joking1/laird.htm
http://www.indygov.org/eGov/Mayor/PR/2004/8/20040818b.htm

If you take the time to read the above links, you will see some typical media BS (like where they say he “was armed with an SKS rifle, similar to a military AK-47”), but the articles explain the situation.

Mo

 

[PotatoJudge]

we have no problem with mental health records being part of the NICS," the source said. "The problem is not with the gun community. The problem is with the medical community" that has traditionally opposed making such records available on privacy grounds.

So we should make medical records public but fight firearm registration to the death? That's very stupid. Medical records could be misused much more easily, in a wider variety of ways, and would effectively pave the way for the removal of all rights.

Sure, take our other rights, just leave the guns. NRA really is a one issue lobby.

 

[ArfinGreebly]

Medical Community?

Well, no.

While my remarks will not meet with agreement from all within the world of "Medicine" I will point out that "mental health" as it is practiced today is not Medicine.

It is true that they have a broad array of pharmacology at their disposal, but drugs are not medicine in and of themselves.

I'm not going to attempt here to detail all the ways that "mental health" fails to meet the standards of Medicine, but fail they do.

Whatever possessed the field of Medicine to adopt the practitioners of the psych "sciences" as fellow "doctors" continues to elude me. What they do isn't science, nor is it medicine. Seriously, what kind of "medicine" VOTES on which phenomena to classify as diseases? That's consensus, not science.

I will stipulate that there are practitioners who do good and even certain drugs that can help. Unhappily, the overwhelming balance does neither.

So, in considering whether anyone was able to identify a nut-job in a timely fashion, let us not project a level of competence or even useability that isn't there to begin with.

Medicine didn't fail. The medical community didn't fail.

Authority, leaning on the supposed workability of a "science" that's never been able to validate itself, failed.

Politics failed. Socialism failed.

Don't confuse "mental health" with medicine.

(Of course, that's cold comfort: Medicine itself has confused the two. And that's truly sad.)

 

[Shifty]

back to the original post re: the thread title..... how exactly is the "medical community" at fault?

as a trauma grunt, i sorta fall into that category and would be slightly offended if that were directed at me

i see the real psychos, the bloody, screaming, headspinning, speaking in tongues, gouging out their eyeballs and talking to imaginary penguins while laughing off multiple tazer applications and still managing to get a few licks in on us and the police. they come in daily. most of you would be shocked to learn how many truly dangerous, totally psychotic people there are out walking around. and my city isnt all that big.

often, they are transient episodes, fueled by drugs or alcohol. not that that is any less dangerous..... and these are the blatantly obvious cases. its the functional, quiet types like the VT killer that really scare me.

bottom line is there are alot of people that should not have access to firearms. cars. sharp sticks. microphones. etc.

the problem is, there is no realistic way to pre-screen to the point of certainty the actions of a free willed individual.

thats the price of living free.

not to sound like a nihlist or anything, but the notion that all problems have acceptable solutions is absolutely absurd. this is an analog reality.

 

[thexrayboy]

The aftermath of this incident reminds me of the US military in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Blame, recrimination and punishment was the order of the day for failing to foresee and prevent the Japanese attack.

Blamemongers, fearmongers and those who wish to ascribe responsiblity for the actions of a warped person to others appear to be rampant. The only person to blame for Cho's actions are Cho. For every person like Cho that show indicators of antisocial tendencies and mental instability and act on them, there are countless dozens who have traversed the same minefield of emotional trauma and upheaval to emerge as whole, healthy and sane adults who did not "snap". Why Cho made the decision to do what he did will be an eternal mystery. We can guess at his thought process but can never know for sure. Many others have been in his same situation and did not resort to murder.

To state that "the medical community is at fault" is nonsense. We still have
trouble understanding the biomechanical functions of the human body and it is trivially simple compared to the brain and it's thought processes. Psychology and treatment of mental illness is still just a small step above the rubber chicken stage of science. We are countless steps away from being able to predict future actions based upon past behavior. Actions are only an indicator of potential future outcomes, not a predictor. Too act upon them
raises a very ugly scene where people lose innate rights based upon the
"evaluation" rendered by an agenda driven person.

 

[rhinov]

I don't think the medical community is at fault and I think the NRA is wrong. I read the federal regulations concernig this issue and didn't like what I read. It seemed like you lose your 2a rights when a judge adjudicates you even if the doctors find you completly sane. To me it sounded that just being sent for evaluation was enough to lose your rights. It also seemed that if you voluntarily get treatment for drug addiction you lose your right to own guns even if you are no longer using drugs. Being a former drug addict doesn't make somebody dangerous. I don't want the government, either federal or state to have a record of the guns I own or my finacial records or my medical records. We are dealing with people who want to ban things even though they don't know what they are banning. Someday they might say that the fact that you own guns or want to own guns means you are mentally impaired. They think that already you know. Be carefull were you compromise.

 

[NM234]

I also wanted to point out that before I stated that we are making advances in medicine rapidly. I said hypothetically, what if you were 100% (or 99.9%) sure someone was cured?

Lincoln was a schizophrenic at one point and became the president (which nowadays would allow him to still own guns, given the president can basically restore anyone's right to bear arms. I say nowadays cause they had no such restrictions on gun control back then), the president who got us through the civil war and passed the bill that freed the slaves. I think that, as others have pointed out, by allowing those declared mentally ill by a judge (who is not a doctor) it gives legislators too much leway to curb 2a rights. Thats why I feel a felony CONVICTION should be the only bar to gun ownership. It might cost a few lives, but I would rather take that risk of dieing than risk allowing people to trample on our rights. In New Hampshire its "Live Free or Die"

 

[akodo]

rmt22 writes

if you go b/f a judge and he/she finds you a danger to yourself/community you SHOULD NOT be able to purchase a gun.

yes and no.

First off, a judge is a legal expert, not a mental health expert.

however, those committed to mental institutes ARE ALREADY BARRED FROM OWNING GUNS BY FEDERAL LAW

Now, we do have a problem with those records not being accessable by the instant checks system.

But really, we have an overall problem with our ability to deal with the mentally ill.

First off, we fail to recognize it, or when we do, often our hands are tied to do anything about it.

When someone is committed or some problem is detected, it is an all or nothing proposition.

I don't want someone coming back from Iraq 2 with post traumatic stress disorder from getting a gun, nor do I want someone who is clinically depressed from getting a gun.....however, I don't want people to be barred from protecting themselves and their family 20 years later when such problems are far behind them.

And it isn't just guns. Even the most minor mental health issue will basically make you unable to get any health insurance again. The thinking is, with so few people actually stepping forward and getting the mental health they need, those that do must be WAY NUTS, too much of an insurance risk. This becomes a self-fufilling prophecy, when all those who have just the most minor mental health issues don't dare get help because if they do, they will be lumped in with 'the rest' of the full blown whackoos.


I think we need some way where you can get mental healthcare, and then at a later date, a simple way to petition to have that record somehow sealed. I was going to say expunged, but I do think there should be data kept just in case something happens later on, where a psychyatrist can say 'hum, this behavior and test results are really border line, but combine that with the fact that 18 years ago he had problem X, i'd say he is a danger to himself/others again'

 

[Pilgrim]

The problem is with the medical community" that has traditionally opposed making such records available on privacy grounds.

I think federal law pretty much guarantees medical record privacy.

Pilgrim