Saturday, August 22, 2015

From the Daily Caller: Don’t Let Agenda-Driven Bureaucrats Set Policy on Guns and Mental Health

John Feinblatt, president and gun-grabbing propagandist extraordinaire for Everytown for Gun Safety, has published an adorable little fable in the The Hill about Senator Cornyn’s (R-TX) bill known as the “Mental Health and Safe Communities Act.” The op-ed is titled “Don’t let the NRA set policy on guns and mental health.”

Mr. Feinblatt opens with the question: “Do we really want to make it easier for people with dangerous mental illness to get guns?” He goes on to claim that the Cornyn bill “backed by the NRA” will do just that. (The bill is also backed by American Jail Association, Council of State Governments, Treatment Advocacy Center, National Association of Social Workers, National Alliance on Mental Illness, National Association of Police Organizations,  and American Correctional Association. )
Nonsense.

What Cornyn’s bill does, among other things,  is clarify certain issues of mental illness with regard to the NICS system, the criminal justice system and law enforcement. One important feature of the bill is to clarify the way in which the term “adjudicated as mentally defective” is used.  Right now, it’s ambiguous for the purposes of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Take, for example, the veterans who are targeted by the most recent gungrabbing efforts of the administration. The administration now wants to claim that any veteran who has a “representative payee” handle their finances is “mentally defective” and shouldn’t be allowed to purchase a firearm. These folks would be added to the NICS system and denied their Second Amendment right without any due process.

Feinblatt writes, “And if your loved one is a veteran with dangerous mental illness? Right now, he can be prohibited from buying and possessing guns, after V.A. proceedings in which he has a right to a hearing. The NRA’s bill changes current law – and allows tens of thousands of veterans with mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder to get guns.”

No it does not.

Here is the relevant part of the bill, curiously omitted by Mr. Feinblatt:

More Here

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