On Thursday morning (or Wednesday night if you ask Andy Levy), the Red Eye crew tackled the new proposed “Gun Violence Restraining Order” law in California that would “temporarily bar a mentally unstable person from buying and possessing firearms after family, partners or friends call police.”
Essentially, the proposed law would allow untrained people to report their family members to police as “dangerous,” and the police would then be free to bar that person from owning a gun, or buying a gun, for an indeterminate amount of time. The flaw in this plan should be obvious, but Jedediah Bila and Stephen Kruiser lay it out clear and bare.
First to answer is Bila:
“I am worried people with no mental health expertise will tell authorities this person can’t carry a gun. what if there is a family fight and someone wants revenge on someone. I don’t want it to be that easy to discriminate against someone for what may be a personal reason that doesn’t warrant it.”
And Kruiser nails it down in typical direct fashion:
“This is the slipperiest slippery slope I think I’ve ever seen. You come from, you know, a dysfunctional family where people actually hate each other in the immediate family they can be launching this kind of stuff all the time, you can get your cousin put away, your brother put away. I don’t see how that works. I mean, I am more for actually getting them into some removed, protected mental health care for awhile rather than just say ‘well you can’t have the guns and the dangerous stuff’, because they’re still gonna be sick and dangerous.”
Kruiser also points out that if you don’t help the root problem, the apparent mental health issue or instability, then if they can’t get a gun legally, they’ll just get it illegally.
Joanne Suchinsky also brings up the excellent point about standards and limitations. If you’re on corrective medication for any reason, you can’t own a gun at all? Not even for hunting? There are people all over this country who are on prescribed medication that shouldn’t make for proscribed activities, including medication for PTSD. Would this bill differentiate? It is a question The Right Scoop’s dunestar has asked before:
So now who gets to decide that you are mentally unstable? More importantly, how unstable do you have to be? Can you carry an M-16 in Afghanistan, but not own a 9 millimeter in your own home? One can protect a nation but not your front yard for fear of becoming unhinged.
…
But what about people who have had eating disorders? What about recovering alcoholics? Are they, too, to be deemed unfit? Where do we draw the line? Who draws the line?
Bila closes with one of the most important points. Andy Levy poses the question of how a person would get off the list, be it by being treated by a mental health professional or other form of help. Bila replies, “I have a feeling it wouldn’t be so temporary.” Indeed, if we have learned anything about government, it is that it’s easier to get on a list than off it, and it’s easier to be forbidden to do something than to be given permission.