The reason why there’s no policy right now to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill is that it is not something that readily lends itself to simple legislation. First of all, doctors are bound by confidentiality and are only permitted to breach this confidentiality when a patient poses a direct threat to himself or others. Any law that attempted to restrict mentally ill patients from getting access to guns would have to include legislation that changes this standard of confidentiality. Then you would also have to define what types, and degrees, of mental illness require being placed on this “no gun” list. Depression? Huge numbers of people suffer from depression. Do we restrict all of those people’s rights? Some depressed people can become psychotic and thus pose a danger to others, some can become suicidal. Do we limit the list just to those with psychotic illnesses like bipolar? There are many highly respected people in all walks of life who suffer from bipolar, Do we limit the list to those with psychotic illnesses who are not responsive to, or refuse to take, medication? Then how often would we update the list? Some patients might go on and off their meds repeatedly. Who will compensate health care providers for taking the time to constantly update this list? What if someone becomes psychotic, but already has a gun? Will there be someone from the government sent to their home to remove the gun?
No mental health related gun restriction would have prevented the San Bernandino shootings. But I think a restriction on assault weapons might have. Yes, criminals can still get guns, but mass shootings are typically not committed by those in gangs or the mafia, or even individual drug dealers or others with criminal records. Terrorists won’t want to try to access the black market to get guns as that is a way to get themselves on somebody’s radar. Lone wolves who snap like at Sandy Hook are unlikely to know how to get illegal weapons nor necessarily the initiative to do so.
If gun manufacturers wanted to stop unnecessary gun violence, they could stop making assault weapons, they could manufacture guns that will only work with owner identification (that technology is already available), and they could divert some of their enormous lobbying budget to support providing additional mental health services to under-served communities. There are states with less than a handful of psychiatrists.
awc, S you want the government bureaucracy that created the no fly list to create another secret list for people who are alleged to be mentally ill. How would that work, and how would it be less vulnerable to error than the no fly list?
Pittsburghscribe’s explanation of why we now have difficulty keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill is spot on. Who is going to decide who is too mentally ill to have a gun? How is the government going to get that information? How will that private health information be kept out of the hands of everyone else? How will it be updated? Those are questions that don’t have easy answers.
I don’t trust people who are not Muslims to tell me what Muslims believe about Sharia law. In fact, I don’t have a lot of faith in non-adherents of a faith explaining to me the rules of that faith, particularly when they disagree with what the adherents tell me. InfinityMan, who is a Muslim, has already explained in this thread that there is no universally accepted version of Sharia law.
"Aryan Brotherhood. Montana Freemen. The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. Defensive Action. Army of God.
Shall I go on?"
You know what a sad comparison that is, that you’re trying to make? How many executions have these groups carried out? Have they beheaded thousands of men, women and children? Have they enslaved, raped, and sold thousands of women and children? Have they taken over large swaths of countries? Have they caused hundreds of thousands, if not millions of refugees to flee their homes?
Is that all you got? It is pathetic to even try to make a comparison between these groups and the multitudes of violent Islamic extremist groups out there.
You know which terrorists have killed a lot of people in the last couple of decades?
Pilots of large airliners. Not just the three 9//11 pilots, but that other guy who suicided with a planeload of passengers. They go around crashing planes into buildings, and suiciding with planeloads of passengers. They want to kill us!!!
There aren’t many pilots in the world, and look at all the carnage they’re causing. Pilots. Every single one is EEEEEVIL. We should be safe, and throw them all out of our country.
There are over a billion and a half Muslims in the world, and a vanishingly small number of them are terrorists. There’s a bigger chance, going by past experience, that a pilot is a terrorist than that a Muslim is a terrorist.
But wait, busdriver says. I’m not a terrorist, my friends who are pilots are not terrorists, nobody I know is a terrorist. Yes, busdriver, and that’s exactly what my Muslim nextdoor neighbors say too.
Hey, if you don’t trust pilots, then don’t fly. Only way they will kill you is if your house unfortunately happens to be in the crash zone. Get your license and fly yourself, or take the train. It’s your choice. And you certainly don’t have to fly on Germanwings, the one airline that had the suicidal pilot. Oops, forgot about the EgyptAir pilot.
I do believe that we are not under great threat by terrorists in this country. However, pretending it’s not a possibility and pretending that millions of people are not threatened by this in other countries is incredibly naïve. In fact, it’s a big part of what gave us ISIS in the first place, they’re no big deal, they’re the JV team, let’s just ignore them. And how many people are suffering for that terrible miscalulation now?
After that snark, I’ll agree that Islamic terrorism is a serious problem and we need to take it seriously.
However, demonizing all Muslims is playing right into ISIS’s hands by driving a wedge between innocent non-terrorist Muslims who are horrified by ISIS and innocent non-Muslims who are equally horrified by ISIS.
"After that snark, I’ll agree that Islamic terrorism is a serious problem and we need to take it seriously.
However, demonizing all Muslims is playing right into ISIS’s hands by driving a wedge between innocent non-terrorist Muslims who are horrified by ISIS and innocent non-Muslims who are equally horrified by ISIS"
And I agree with that. There is no good purpose in demonizing all Muslims, whatsoever.
However, for those who downplay Islamic terrorism as if it barely exists aren’t being honest. And those who pretend that the treatment of women in many predominantly Muslim countries is acceptable aren’t being honest either.
“Don’t go No True Scotsman on me. They were flying the plane. That makes them pilots”
No way. Apparently they only learned how to work the controls inflight. If you can’t do a preflight, you can’t take off or land, you aren’t a pilot. It’s like saying that anyone who can use Microsoft flight simulator is a pilot.
Here, I’ll give you a quick lesson and you can be a pilot like the 9/11 hijackers. You push forward, the houses get bigger, you pull back, the houses get smaller. That’s about all they knew how to do.
Who in this thread said anything like that? We have been discussing whether it makes sense to ban all Muslims, or all Muslim refugees, from entering our country. We haven’t been saying that the US government should stop trying to defeat ISIS.
“Who in this thread said anything like that? We have been discussing whether it makes sense to ban all Muslims, or all Muslim refugees, from entering our country. We haven’t been saying that the US government should stop trying to defeat ISIS.”
Then I guess we’ve been having discussions in an alternate universe. I don’t think I’ve read any posts that have supported banning all Muslims, or Muslim refugees from entering the country. Maybe I missed them.
The above was referring to the 9/11 terrorists. That meme went around after 9/11, but it’s untrue, even if for no other reason than that they’d have been unable to get pilot training that taught them that without the rest of it.