The mental health issues regarding gun ownership and use are well presented by several authors, and I will quote or paraphrase freely from them to convey their valuable contributions to an even wider audience. In my opinion, the information provided by these authors should be as widely disseminated and as frequently as possible to the general public who are constantly bombarded with the spurious and endlessly repetitive arguments regarding guns from the left and the right.
Joaquin Sapien, writing in, How the NRA Undermined Congress’ Last Push for Gun Control, ProPublica, Jan. 24, 2013, pointed out, “In order to get the support of the NRA, Congress agreed to two concessions that had long been on the agenda of gun rights advocates — concessions that later proved to hamstring the database. The NRA wanted the government to change the way it deemed someone to be “mentally defective,” excluding people, for example, who were no longer under any psychiatric supervision or monitoring. The group also pushed for a way for the mentally ill to regain gun rights if they could prove in court that they’d been rehabilitated. The NRA found allies on both sides of the aisle to champion the concessions.”
The NRA agreed to the support the bill, in exchange for provisions pushing states—as opposed to the federal government–to create gun rights restoration programs, a stance that gave the NRA an opportunity to appear to be supportive of keeping guns out of the hands of truly insane persons, a position they trumpeted. It also gave the NRA and the law makers they control a very convenient loophole to thwart actual implementation, a palatable compromise for the rank and file of the NRA who have bought into the fear of big government taking control of all guns if any gun ownership is compromised in the least.
Since 1968, the law has made its leisurely way through state legislatures and is still not in anything like a majority agreement to make limitations state by state. The effective arguments, largely conveyed behind closed doors, convinced many sympathetic law makers that it would be costly for states to share their data within and without the state’s borders. Sapien explains that, “A state agency would have to monitor the courts, collect the names of people who had been institutionalized, and then send that information to the FBI on a regular basis. So, to help pay for data-sharing, Congress created $375 million in annual federal grants and incentives. But to be eligible for the federal money, the states would have to set-up a gun restoration program approved by the Justice Department. No gun rights restoration program, no money to help pay for sharing data.” And a win-win for the NRA and its heavy-handed concept of who should and who should not own guns (precious few of the latter).
As time as gone on, the federal government has had to resort to try and create legislation to provide both incentives and harsh penalties to force states to put names into the database. For the NRA, the convoluted purpose of that database is eventually to find data that will allow as many people with records of serious mental illness—three months of involuntary hospital confinement for mental illness, for example—to have their rights restored to have gun ownership.
The NRA won even more concessions by the time the proposed legislation reached the Senate. Language was inserted that would allow a person’s application for gun restoration rights to be granted automatically if an agency failed to respond within 365 days of the application and allowed people to have their attorney’s fees reimbursed if they were forced to go to court to restore their rights. That constituted an extremely expensive record keeping and information sharing effort foisted onto already financially strapped states. It came as no surprise to anyone that it was easier for states to let the statute of limitations pass, and applicants gain or regain their gun ownership rights even if they were deemed a danger by their care-givers, neighbors, or local law enforcement. The final bill was signed by President George W. Bush in January, 2008, an action which significantly increased his political (and financial assistance for campaigns) currency with the gun ownership community.
To no one’s great surprise, the NRA called the law “pro-gun legislation” and a victory for gun owners, and to its members, a clarion call for more donations to be certain that the NRA’s good work would continue to be well funded. The sponsors of the bill issued public statements that they support making improvements in the mental health data base; but, as quoted by Sapien, they emphasized that, overall, “we first must ensure our constitutional rights and individual liberties.” (read: the nearly unfettered right to own firearms). The law has serious flaws in implementation—again not unanticipated. Many states do not share all of their mental health records. Actually, as of 2012, only twelve states have cooperated. It is only fair to state that even that poor showing resulted in a huge improvement in the numbers of people whose mental health data became party to the system. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have “reported fewer than 100 records. Seventeen states reported fewer than 10 records, and four submitted no data at all…Millions of records identifying seriously mentally ill people and drug abusers as prohibited purchasers are missing from the federal background check database because of lax reporting by state agencies,” Sapien’s research revealed. Others simply can’t afford the expense of gleaning the data from the courts, providing it to the relevant state agency, and then passing it on to the federal government.
Like most such efforts, revealing this type of data is a complicated problem; and it is not fair to blame all states, legislators, and executive branches as being tools of the NRA. Some states cannot because of stiff privacy laws; the influence of the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) exerts such powerful influence to protect the rights and privacy of mentally ill persons even to the extent of protecting gun ownership rights. A New York Times investigation found that many states have not qualified for federal funding to share their data because they have not as yet established gun rights restoration programs. Ironically, some states have had trouble setting up restoration programs because gun control advocates in those states have protested them.
As strange as it may seem, many states have different interpretations of their understanding about exactly (strict legal parlance) what kind of data must be provided and to whom; and more troublesome overall is the vexing issue of what—precisely—does “mentally ill” and “involuntarily committed” mean in the context of the law and the implications for gun ownership by such persons? That issue will be dealt with in blogpost 3 on the subject.