Many folks are scared of “mentally unstable folks” with guns. Me too.
However, being scared doesn’t mean that we get to take the rights away from people we’re uncomfortable around – or whose demographic group might be found to be statistically more “dangerous” than another.
“Mental illness” is itself an unstable concept — Asperger’s Syndrome has been listed as a separate disorder in the e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but it looks like it will be collapsed into the spectrum of autism-related disorders in the DSM-5. Indeed, the more you learn about the history of the DSM, the less it looks like a scientific document and more the product of a congress, with “diseases” voted in and out because of ideological pressure and fashion and whim. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think, but the actual process was no more scientific than changing the recipe for hot dogs, the manufacture of which we are warned not to inquire about.
Ask David Lewis, a 35-year-old gentleman from Amherst, New York. His guns were confiscated by the state. Why? He was once prescribed an anti-anxiety medicine, and that flagged him as unstable under New York’s new gun law.
A judge just ruled that the state has to give him his guns back.
Talk about slippery slopes. Were it not for one commonsense judge, New Yorkers who’ve experienced some social anxiety would have been lumped in with utter crazies, and had their rights simply stripped.
Indeed, they already have. Lewis is almost certainly not the only perfectly sensible citizen to have had his guns grabbed.
Thus it begins.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
7 replies on “Guns Grabbed in New York”
All right. How do you suggest we differentiate between mental illness and MENTAL ILLNESS? Many psychiatrist can’t agree on this differentiation and whether they can break patient confidentialiy to report it to law enforcement.
How would you handle this??? I also have a problem with those that think that a backgrund check is some kind of infringement on gun ownership. When I want to become a Park & recs volunteer for the Cityn of Roseville, I had to go thru a background check including paper work, photo, and finger printing. Without a background check how do you differentiate between Johnathan Dillinger, bank president and John Dillinger, number one on the FBI’S 10 most wanted list. How do you identify straw purchasers who buy many guns a month (from different dealers) to sell them to gangs??? What’s wrong with an “E verify” for gun purchasers?
…. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think ….
That’s the one that saved me the price of the DSM-IV but “progress?”
Is a man who looks at his naked self in a mirror and sees a woman not the very definition of deranged?
Got me hangin’ ….
Sometimes you feel like a nut.
The treatment isn’t to then crush you and sprinkle you on a sundae.
A wwhiel back, i read that almsot all of the recent mass murders were registered Democrats; awith the exceptions of the two high school punks at Columbine ( too young to vote, but theeir parents were Dems) and the one who shot the Congresswoman ( but didn’t kill her-forgot the name) and kileld others in Tucson–he was sort of a marxist, but no real political views.
if true,l then perhaps just bar Democrats from having guns.
makes as much sense.
Brian Richard Allen:
What does someone seeing hallucinations in a mirror have to do with sexual orientation?
Jay that is a very good idea since most democrats were born withour brains!
I mean without brains