Tom Maguire:
Yeah, yeah, the sun rises in the east, my morning paper is delivered, and the Times has another daft article about gun rights. Their latest:
Mental Health Issues Put 34,500 on New York’s No-Guns List
Is that a good thing or an emerging scandal? It’s complicated! Remember, in lib-world taking guns away from people who respect the law is a good thing. But taking guns away from victims of victims of society, such as the mentally ill, is problematic. Away we go:
A newly created database of New Yorkers deemed too mentally unstable to carry firearms has grown to roughly 34,500 names, a previously undisclosed figure that has raised concerns among some mental health advocates that too many people have been categorized as dangerous.
Ahh, we need to protect the victims (and minimize their tendency to violence). The Times offers some background, with my emphasis:
The database, established in the aftermath of the mass shooting in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and maintained by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, is the result of the Safe Act. It is an expansive package of gun control measures pushed through by the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The law, better known for its ban on assault weapons, compels licensed mental health professionals in New York to report to the authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”
And back to the analysis:
But the number of entries in the database highlights the difficulty of America’s complicated balancing act between public safety and the right to bear arms when it comes to people with mental health issues. “That seems extraordinarily high to me,” said Sam Tsemberis, a former director of New York City’s involuntary hospitalization program for homeless and dangerous people, now the chief executive of Pathways to Housing, which provides housing to the mentally ill. “Assumed dangerousness is a far cry from actual dangerousness.”
Dangerous to whom? Remember (and the Times will barely nudgeyour memory on this point), roughly 60% of gun deaths are suicides. Pressing on, the Times notes the alliance of gun nuts with, well, nut nuts:
Similar laws in other states have raised the ire of gun rights proponents, who worry that people who posed no threat at all would have their rights infringed. Mental health advocates have also argued that the laws unnecessarily stigmatized people with mental illnesses.
Some ink is splashed towards TimesWorld:
Gun control supporters argue a wide net is appropriate, given the potentially dire consequences.
Even if just one dangerous person had a gun taken away, “that’s a good thing,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director of the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence. The National Rifle Association of America favors a separate “process of adjudication” to make sure that “these decisions are not being made capriciously and maliciously,” Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman, said.
And back towards obfuscation: