As a direct response to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting — in which a mentally ill gunman took the lives of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school — then President Barack Obama introduced legislation that would require the Social Security Administration to submit names of beneficiaries with mental impairments to a federal background check system in order to block said patients’ legal access to firearms.
This was political grandstanding, as the shooter had stolen the weapon from his mother who passed the background check, and would have passed the proposed additions to the background check process. This law, if enacted before Sandy Hook, would have had no impact on the event taking place.
And, with a Republican majority alongside President Trump, a recent vote this month blocked the Obama legislation that would limit some 75,000 mentally ill patients from access to firearms.
Well, let’s be clear. This was not legislation, it was an Obama executive order, done to bypass Congress because they wouldn’t do what he asked.
If a specific individual is likely to be violent due to the nature of their mental illness, then the government should have to prove it,” Grassley said.
Yes, absolutely. That’s the way due process, the core foundational notion behind our entire concept of justice, works.
By Grassley’s rationale, a mentally ill person — regardless of the severity of their diagnosis or their independent standing in society — should have uninhibited access to deadly weapons until if and only when they are proven dangerous, despite their diagnosis. Which — as you would be correct to summize — would undoubtedly be after committing a violent act in which innocent people are hurt or killed.
Not at all. There are plenty of mental conditions that warrant immediate removal of access to firearms as the person is deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. What Grassley is saying here, what conservatives have been saying all along about simply rolling the Social Security numbers into the NICS system, is that people are put on that system based on financial competence. We’re not just talking about a list of people with diagnosed mental illnesses, we’re talking about anyone who has been determined that someone else must manage their finances and is labeled as a fiduciary. That’s a far cry from a blanket claim that they should all have their rights stripped from them.
