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Gun Rights and Mental Illness: Answering Readers’ Questions
This is in 2 post's
By MICHAEL LUO In an article in The New York Times on Sunday, Michael Luo examined how states across the country were increasingly allowing people who lost their firearm rights because of mental illness to petition to have those rights restored.
While several states have had such restoration laws for some time, more than 20 have passed similar measures since 2008. The increase has been traced to a law passed by Congress after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech that was actually meant to make it harder for people with mental illness to get guns.
In this post, Mr. Luo is answering questions submitted by readers about the restoration of gun rights for people with a history of mental illness. His answers are posted in reverse order, with the most recently posted answers first followed by earlier answers.
Q.
Why don’t the courts require a mental health professional to assess the person’s current condition and likelihood of relapse before considering requests for restoration of gun rights? I don’t understand how a judge with no mental health training could be making those decisions when the person has a history of violence. — Shelley, San Francisco
A.
You ask a good question. I would say that this is actually a decision that rests more at the level of the legislators in each state. They would be the ones setting down the statutory requirements for these petitions.
As I wrote in the article, the National Rifle Association and other advocacy groups have lobbied in states across the country to keep the requirements to a minimum, within the confines of the federal law. Their argument is that this should not be an excessively onerous process. They would argue, for example, that someone who was involuntarily committed decades ago and has been fine since then should not be required to pay for and undergo a psychiatric examination.
I mentioned in the article what happened in Idaho, where a committee of law enforcement officials initially proposed a law that would have required a recent psychiatric examination: Without the N.R.A.’s backing, the bill went nowhere. Eventually the state did pass a bill, but a different one that the N.R.A. helped to draft — and that did not contain this requirement.
In Virginia, I found that some judges were asking for notes from doctors, while others were not. But even these types of personal notes from doctors can be problematic.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Superior Court in Los Angeles, which actually has a court-appointed psychiatrist examine each petitioner at the court’s expense. This is not required under California law; the court does it on its own initiative. I did not encounter that practice anywhere else in the country. But even the Los Angeles approach is not foolproof, of course, as I point out in the article.
You also touch on the question of who should be handling these petitions. Most states have entrusted them to judges, but some have made different choices. New York, for example, handles them through an executive agency, the Office of Mental Health. In Oregon, a state body called the Psychiatric Security Review Board deals with them.
Q.
Let me change the subject, from people with mental illness to people with a criminal record. Are they permitted to get a gun, and does the N.R.A. have a position on this? I would have thought that it would be very hard, if not impossible, for a person with a criminal record to get a gun, but I was surprised by the article that people with mental illness can get one, so now I wonder.
And I thought that it would put the N.R.A. in a difficult position: On the one hand, they might want to allow a person with a criminal record to be able to get a gun (that is, if the person paid their debt to society and is now law-abiding) because it is a Second Amendment right. On the other hand, they have maintained that the real problem is that we don’t have tougher laws against criminals.
A.
Under federal law, convicted felons are generally not allowed to buy or possess firearms. But there is some language in the statute that allows felons in some states to get their gun rights restored under certain conditions. Sometimes this occurs through the courts; sometimes through a pardon process at the governor’s office; in some states it happens automatically upon the discharge of their sentences. It is a very complicated area of the law.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used to run a federal firearms rights restoration program that allowed convicted felons to apply. But an investigation published in 1991 by the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, found that some people whose firearms rights were restored by that agency were subsequently been convicted of crimes. The center also found that the agency had been spending several million dollars a year conducting background investigations for these applications. In the wake of the group’s report, Congress stopped financing the program, and it has not been active since.
I have not asked the N.R.A. specifically about the issue of felon restorations. But the group has been interested in the issue of restoration of firearms rights for a long time, and it generally takes issue with the lifetime prohibitions in the federal statute. I’m not speaking for them, but I believe they would probably argue that someone who was convicted years ago of a felony, particularly a nonviolent one, but has been a law-abiding citizen since then should be able to exercise his or her Second Amendment rights.
This is in 2 post's
By MICHAEL LUO In an article in The New York Times on Sunday, Michael Luo examined how states across the country were increasingly allowing people who lost their firearm rights because of mental illness to petition to have those rights restored.
While several states have had such restoration laws for some time, more than 20 have passed similar measures since 2008. The increase has been traced to a law passed by Congress after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech that was actually meant to make it harder for people with mental illness to get guns.
In this post, Mr. Luo is answering questions submitted by readers about the restoration of gun rights for people with a history of mental illness. His answers are posted in reverse order, with the most recently posted answers first followed by earlier answers.
Q.
Why don’t the courts require a mental health professional to assess the person’s current condition and likelihood of relapse before considering requests for restoration of gun rights? I don’t understand how a judge with no mental health training could be making those decisions when the person has a history of violence. — Shelley, San Francisco
A.
You ask a good question. I would say that this is actually a decision that rests more at the level of the legislators in each state. They would be the ones setting down the statutory requirements for these petitions.
As I wrote in the article, the National Rifle Association and other advocacy groups have lobbied in states across the country to keep the requirements to a minimum, within the confines of the federal law. Their argument is that this should not be an excessively onerous process. They would argue, for example, that someone who was involuntarily committed decades ago and has been fine since then should not be required to pay for and undergo a psychiatric examination.
I mentioned in the article what happened in Idaho, where a committee of law enforcement officials initially proposed a law that would have required a recent psychiatric examination: Without the N.R.A.’s backing, the bill went nowhere. Eventually the state did pass a bill, but a different one that the N.R.A. helped to draft — and that did not contain this requirement.
In Virginia, I found that some judges were asking for notes from doctors, while others were not. But even these types of personal notes from doctors can be problematic.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Superior Court in Los Angeles, which actually has a court-appointed psychiatrist examine each petitioner at the court’s expense. This is not required under California law; the court does it on its own initiative. I did not encounter that practice anywhere else in the country. But even the Los Angeles approach is not foolproof, of course, as I point out in the article.
You also touch on the question of who should be handling these petitions. Most states have entrusted them to judges, but some have made different choices. New York, for example, handles them through an executive agency, the Office of Mental Health. In Oregon, a state body called the Psychiatric Security Review Board deals with them.
Q.
Let me change the subject, from people with mental illness to people with a criminal record. Are they permitted to get a gun, and does the N.R.A. have a position on this? I would have thought that it would be very hard, if not impossible, for a person with a criminal record to get a gun, but I was surprised by the article that people with mental illness can get one, so now I wonder.
And I thought that it would put the N.R.A. in a difficult position: On the one hand, they might want to allow a person with a criminal record to be able to get a gun (that is, if the person paid their debt to society and is now law-abiding) because it is a Second Amendment right. On the other hand, they have maintained that the real problem is that we don’t have tougher laws against criminals.
A.
Under federal law, convicted felons are generally not allowed to buy or possess firearms. But there is some language in the statute that allows felons in some states to get their gun rights restored under certain conditions. Sometimes this occurs through the courts; sometimes through a pardon process at the governor’s office; in some states it happens automatically upon the discharge of their sentences. It is a very complicated area of the law.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used to run a federal firearms rights restoration program that allowed convicted felons to apply. But an investigation published in 1991 by the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, found that some people whose firearms rights were restored by that agency were subsequently been convicted of crimes. The center also found that the agency had been spending several million dollars a year conducting background investigations for these applications. In the wake of the group’s report, Congress stopped financing the program, and it has not been active since.
I have not asked the N.R.A. specifically about the issue of felon restorations. But the group has been interested in the issue of restoration of firearms rights for a long time, and it generally takes issue with the lifetime prohibitions in the federal statute. I’m not speaking for them, but I believe they would probably argue that someone who was convicted years ago of a felony, particularly a nonviolent one, but has been a law-abiding citizen since then should be able to exercise his or her Second Amendment rights.
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