Troubling, considering mental illness is 100% subjective. There are no lab tests to confirm or deny a mental illness diagnoses, it merely depends on a persons opinion. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this could lead.
See, but that’s my point. I don’t think it’s helpful to use the “something should be done!” rhetoric without putting your money where your mouth is and defining “something.” You seem to be using the l know it when I see it standard of disordered thinking, which ain’t good enough.
The post above are for general context, this is not a reply to either of them.
OK, I think we can all agree there are crazy people out there that should not have guns (whatever you standard for crazy enough may be).
I'm going to use "crazy" to mean mentally ill to the point where we don't want them to have a gun.
So the question becomes first, how do you qualify crazy, and second, how do you determine a person is or isn't.
Currently it's pretty clear. A crazy person has to have been adjudicated mentally incompetent. This doesn't actually provide a clear, free from interpretation, test. But it does provide due process, so a person has the opportunity to provide opinions favorable to themselves.
The hype seems to be about finding an easier, or better, way of determining this, preferably before an individual takes any clear action.
It's easy to look at the shooters past and say it was full of red flags, but acting on those would have meant either denying a right without due process or using highly subjective criteria to adjudicate someone as mentally ill (which without confinement would have certainly made the situation worse).
I've had a brief email exchange with a noted forensic psychologist (and attorney) who specializes in violent behavior, about the scale used to determine risk. It's a simple scale going from "Low Risk" to "High Risk", there is no "zero risk". This is important because the best case scenario is that a subject will be determined to be a "Low Risk" of violent behavior. Guess how the courts will interpret a report that finds the individual to be a "Low Risk"? The point is, that whatever standard is used to determine crazy, it has to be extremely clear.
So, how would you determine "Crazy". I honestly don't think there is a good solution for this. How many visits from the PD are too many? How many complaints, and from whom, are too many? Do you do a psych eval on everyone, or just on those who want to buy a gun? Lots of way to abuse this, no good answers.
I do think this was part of what suitability in MA was supposed to be, but insufficient language and courts that were looking for an excuse to deny, regardless of a real need, turned it into simple oppression. I actually tried to get my rep to put in a bill subtly changing suitability by requiring that a specific incident had to be identified and that it must have occured within 5 years (misdemeanor assaults only count for 5 years), but you can imagine the reaction I got from a Lib Dem (Fudd gun owner).
Anyway, what are your
specific ideas for identifying crazy before something happens?
