But it’s a big one.  David LaPell writing at Ammoland.

The bill (S7065) (A01589) would make it mandatory that every gun owner in the state of New York get a mental health evaluation before they could purchase a firearm. This wouldn’t be a one-time thing, this would be for every gun and of course, these evaluations would have to be held at a location of the state of New York’s choosing and would be at the expense of the person looking to purchase the gun.

[ … ]

There is also a larger and much more sinister motive to think about here. New York passed its own version of a Red Flag law last year, and unlike other states, it allows schools and just about anyone else to petition the courts to get an ERPO and have someone’s firearms taken away. Now can you imagine every gun owner now having to be subjected to a mental health exam, over and over again, where one wrong question, one misconstrued answer or even the bias of the doctor could not only prevent someone from legally buying the gun they were looking to get, but also lead to the police coming to the house and taking the rest and with a doctor’s word versus the citizen’s in court, the gun owner, soon to become the former gun owner, wouldn’t stand a chance legally.

This is a page right out of the communist playbook.

Not even mentioned is the fact that mental health professionals don’t want to be involved in such things, don’t believe that their trade can accurately predict those predisposed to violence, and certainly don’t want the liability and professional risk.

Always remember what reader Menckenlite said.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

The communists never sleep.  We can’t either.

Via David Codrea, this interesting bit of information about one Virginia politician.

This is telling, but not what caught my eye.  To me this quote is more important.

The behavior of the 2A supporters at the forum was childish and boorish … they were disturbing and indicative of mental health issues among many 2A supporters.”

I’ve complained before about incorrect use of the phrase “begging the question.”  Many people use it in the context of a question that necessarily comes to mind given that something else has been said.

That’s not right.  Don’t use the expression that way.  Begging the question is a formal logical fallacy, to wit, presupposing the consequent.

In this case, he begs the question.  He’s in the position is explaining that many 2A supporters have mental health issues, and if someone were to ask him what constitutes a mental health issue, he would have to say, “Why, there it is, right there.  Unyielding support for the 2A.”

You see, they want to confiscate weapons from people who have mental health issues, and to them, the mere act of wanting a firearm in the first place is a sign of mental health issues.

Understand?

Via reader Mack, let’s play a game.  “We need a mental health database.”  Who said this?  Let’s name names.

Andrew Cuomo:

Democrats should come together with one clear message on gun safety.

The federal gov’t must:

1) Outlaw assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
2) Create a mental health database
3) Pass universal background checks
4) Pass a Red Flag Law

Wayne LaPierre:

None other than Wayne LaPierre has suggested the same idea. Jeryl Bier pointed me to this speech delivered by LaPierre in 2012 after the Sandy Hook massacre. So frantic was the NRA to steer the conversation away from gun regulations that it proposed having the feds keep tabs on America’s mental illnesses instead.

“How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame – from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave – while provoking others to make their mark?

A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”

Always remember what reader Menckenlite said.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Wayne is as much of a “control freak” as Cuomo.

Military.com.

Such laws could be used to “identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but, when necessary, involuntary confinement,” Trump said. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.”

[ … ]

“To put this in perspective, there are over 1.6 million disabled veterans with a service-connected adjudication by VA of mental illness, including one million veterans with PTSD,” he said.

Let me assist Military.com with their article headline.  “Trump backs red flag laws that WILL impact veteran gun ownership.”

Because.  Forecasting the future, witchcraft, sorcery, wicked divination by community witchdoctors who may as well howl at the moon at midnight and throw chicken bones over their shoulder.

There.  Fixed.

David Codrea:

Or as lead researcher Dr. Kate Allsopp concludes:

“Although diagnostic labels create the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can create stigma and prejudice.”

Liberty advocates concerned about due process-denying gun confiscations empowered by “red flag laws” should see the danger of this, when even the experts can’t agree on the basics.

As we’ve noted before, the number of psychiatric experts we can trot out to show that the various mental “diagnoses” don’t correspond with propensity to violence is virtually limitless.

Or as reader Menckenlite observed concerning guns and mental health?

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

But there is no shame among pols who trot out red flag laws.

TMZ:

The host of “America’s Most Wanted,” who also helped create a national registry for sex offenders, says the same system is needed for mentally ill people looking to buy guns.

We got John Walsh Saturday at LAX and asked what he made of Florida’s new gun law — in which the age limit to purchase guns was raised to 21 … and teachers can now be armed.

He says it’s a step in the right direction, but also thinks arming teachers is the wrong way to protect schools from potential shooters — he wants trained pros on the ground instead.

Here’s the most interesting tidbit … John apparently believes a national registry logging people with serious mental illness needs to be implemented for would-be gun owners.

I don’t watch television so I don’t see him on TV.  But you see where this is going, right?  The progs want a registry of everyone with notes about what the village witch doctor thinks about him.  We’ve seen this advocated before.

If you think the second amendment is all about amelioration of tyranny, then maybe you will be on that list too.  After all, who decides what mental illness is and who suffers from it?  Remember what commenter Menckenlite observed concerning guns and mental health?

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Never forget that such a system bypasses due process.  That’s why the progressives love it.

New York Upstate:

TABERG, NY – Don Hall was sitting in his living room watching TV with his girlfriend about 9:30 p.m. earlier this year when he was startled by flashing police car lights in his driveway.

Hall met the Oneida County sheriff’s deputies in the driveway, worried that they were bringing bad news about a family member.

Instead, the deputies produced an official document demanding that Hall, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran who is a retired pipefitter, turn over his guns to them on the spot. On the document Hall said he was described as “mentally defective.”

When Hall told police he’d never had any mental issues, Hall said, deputies told him he must have done something that triggered the order under the New York state’s SAFE Act.

The deputies left that night with six guns – two handguns and four long guns.

Hall, who lives in the Oneida County hamlet of Taberg, hired a lawyer and secured affidavits from local hospitals to prove he hadn’t been recently treated. At one point, he was told he’d have to get some of his guns back from a gun shop.

Eventually, his lawyer convinced a judge that authorities had him confused with someone else who had sought care and that his weapons should never have been seized.

To this day, no one at a hospital or the state and local agencies involved in taking Hall’s guns has admitted to Hall that a mistake was made, explained what happened or apologized. A county judge did acknowledge the mistake and helped him get his guns back.

Hall said the ordeal was frustrating.

“I was guilty until I could prove myself innocent,” Hall said. “They don’t tell you why or what you supposedly did. It was just a bad screw-up.”

Under what legal authority Hall’s guns were confiscated is in disagreement.

Hall and his lawyer said they are convinced his guns were taken as a result of a report under the NY SAFE Act. The New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act was adopted in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newton, Conn.

The law includes, among other things, a provision for health providers to report patients that they believe are a risk to harm others or themselves.

The state Office of Mental Health, however, found Hall’s case was reported through a system set up by the federal Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, said James Plastiras, a spokesman for the state mental health office. That law, adopted in 1993, is named after James Brady, who was shot by John Hinckley Jr. during an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The federal law includes a provision that requires a hospital or medical facility to report anyone who is involuntarily committed or has been ruled mentally defective by a court or similar legal body.

A hospital reported to the state Office of Mental Health that a person had been involuntarily admitted to a mental facility, Plastiras said. That information was passed onto the FBI for inclusion on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, he said.

[ … ]

Once the state Office of Mental Health is alerted through either law, the staff checks records held by the state Department of Criminal Justice Services to see if the person has any guns.

Any matches go to the state police to verify that the identity of the person matches the identity of the gun owner. Once confirmed, the state police takes the case to a local judge who issues an order to confiscate the person’s weapons. Local police usually are dispatched to confiscate the weapons.

One thing the state and Hall and his lawyer agree on is the misidentification that lead to Hall’s guns being seized appears to have started when Hall was confused with some other patient at risk.

The day after Hall’s guns were seized in February, he called the gun licensing office in Oneida County. When he told them his guns were wrongly taken, he was told he could attend a hearing in a few weeks.

Instead, Hall called lawyer John Panzone, who advised him to get depositions from every local hospital stating he had not recently been treated. Panzone hoped the affidavits would prove Hall couldn’t be the person initially reported to be at risk.

Hall said he and his girlfriend, Connie Heidenreich, spent the next day visiting three Utica-area hospitals to get the statements.

Hall said the only time he had been a patient at any of the hospitals was four years ago when he had a sleep apnea test at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

At St. Elizabeth’s, Hall said a clerk looked up his name and read him a Social Security number. He said it was slightly different than his. “She turned white as a ghost,” Hall recalled.

Panzone believes another patient from Oneida County with Hall’s name was treated at the hospital and flagged for a mental health issue. Somehow that man’s Social Security number got mixed up with Hall’s, thus creating the error, the lawyer said.

The YouTube video of this report can be found here.

First of all, I don’t want to hear another word about how oath-taking LEOs will respect the constitution and refuse to obey unconstitutional orders.  The confiscation order was clearly unconstitutional and immoral and yet the LEOs enforced it upon command.

Second, I don’t care that the person who made the screw-up was a hospital employee.  She was an organ of the state when she made the reporting, and if I had that job I would resign.  When you do things like this you are in effect a government employee.

Third, consider what has happened in this report.  A man who is a war veteran had his weapons confiscated because someone submitted his name as having an admission to a local hospital for a mental malady.  Now listen closely.  Even if this was correct (and we know from the facts of the case that it wasn’t), we’ve already demonstrated conclusively from the reports of mental health professionals that mental illness has no relationship to propensity for violence, and that violent behavior cannot be predicted by mental health professionals because of this.

The case is closed.  There is no longer any debate on this issue.  Moreover, we know from scientific studies that limiting access to firearms of the mentally ill does not reduce suicide deaths.  For some progressives who simply want to worship the totem pole of mental health and behavioristic psychology, and who are well intentioned, they refuse to listen to the science behind their incorrect perceptions of the world.  They want to bow down and worship at the altar of the local witch doctor, or the psychiatrist, as if he knows how to make everything better.

But for most people, they know better than to believe that violence is related to illness rather than moral maladies and evil, and yet they throw out the red herring of mental illness anyway in order to cover over their real intentions, which is yet another gun control and confiscatory scheme.

That’s what happened here.  The SAFE act is anything but safe, because it protects no one and places peaceable, law abiding men in harm’s way.  But there are hundreds like it around the country, where guns cannot be purchased unless LEOs sign off on forms that include mental health information, or send out confiscation orders upon command from their superiors over anything from family problems to alleged abuse by some pissed off spouse.

Those LEOs will confiscate guns just like the LEOs in this report.  Don’t doubt it for one minute.  Be prepared.  And if you believe in God, family and the second amendment, and especially that the second amendment is about amelioration of tyranny, you are in danger of being judged mentally incompetent.  There are thousands of Soldiers and Marines who served faithfully who are in the NICS today because someone said they have PTSD.

Finally, note that every time the government – local, state or federal – involves themselves in a program, they are a fuck-up.  They cannot get anything right, except for running a military, and most of the time they don’t even do that well.  A lot of bad men make it to staff and flag officer level, and if you think we have thinking men running the show at the Pentagon, take a look at the two campaigns of “armed social science” we had in Iraq and Afghanistan, believing that we could force Muslims to accept liberty and freedom with COIN tactics, men who love tyranny and the yoke of oppression more than life itself.

And the progressives want to put the government more fully in charge of your health care.  Think about that for a moment.  Let that wash over you.  Incompetent fools and clowns like the ones described above want to make decisions on health care for your families.

Professor Jeffrey Swanson:

The gun restriction rule is a well-meaning policy that gets some things right, notably its support of federal efforts to improve detection of risky people who should not have legal access to guns. But despite its good intentions, what the policy actually does is take away the gun rights of a large category of individuals without any evidence that they pose a risk of harm to self or others, and without legal due process protections commensurate with abridging a constitutional right.

All we really know about many people in the affected category is that they have been found unable to work full time due to a mental health problem and an examiner for Social Security has decided, with some input from a licensed medical or psychological consultant, that they need help managing money. The mental health conditions in question might range from moderate intellectual disabilities to depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Based on one person’s judgment call, arrangements are made to have the government’s check sent to a representative payee. But this isn’t an index for whether or not someone should be allowed to own a gun.

Research on the relationship between gun violence and mental illness shows that the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are not violent or suicidal. Our group at Duke recently published a study of approximately 82,000 people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses in Florida between 2002 and 2011. We found that those with serious mental health disorders with records in the public behavioral health system were no more likely than the general adult population in Florida to use a gun to harm others (about 213 vs. 217 gun crimes per 100,000 people per year), and they were only slightly more likely to die in a gun-related suicide (about 13 vs. 9 gun suicides per 100,000 people per year). Thus, people with mental illnesses are no more dangerous to others when they have equal access to guns.

Our study, like many others, found that mental illness substantially increases the risk of suicide in general. Many, if not most, people who die from suicide have suffered from a mental illness. But our data also show that they are less like to use a gun when they do end their own lives, and are more likely to use other means.  While 48 percent of suicides in the general Florida adult population involved guns, only 20 percent of suicides in our study population of people with serious mental illnesses involved guns. The annual rate — 13 gun suicides per 100,000 people with mental illness — shows that gun suicide is a rare event in this population. Moreover, only a tiny fraction of all people with mental illness who are at risk of suicide are Social Security disability beneficiaries with representative payees. Thus there just isn’t evidence that reporting these particular individuals to the National Instant Criminal Background Check system will prevent suicides.

No doubt, the ban on Social Security recipients buying guns wasn’t a well meaning policy.  We’ve discussed this at length before.  But ignoring the professor’s leftist leanings for the moment, he’s actually given some very good information from the perspective of a mental health professional.

His view comports with that of other mental health professionals as I’ve noted.

In a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish investigate a number of common beliefs about mental illness and gun violence, including the idea that “psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens.” They write that “legislation in a number of states now mandates that psychiatrists assess their patients for the potential to commit violent gun crime.” New York, for instance, “requires mental health professionals to report anyone who ‘is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others’ to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, which then alerts the local authorities to revoke the person’s firearms license and confiscate his or her weapons.”

However, they argue, asking psychiatrists to judge who’s likely to become violent may be the wrong approach. They cite research showing that most gun violence isn’t committed by people who are determined to have mental illness — and that most people with mental illness don’t commit violence. According to one study, “the risk is exponentially greater that individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness will be assaulted by others, rather than the other way around.”

Random gun violence is a terrifying fact of American life, because of both the violence and the randomness. Terror bred by violence does not really require comment; they are twinned. But terror bred by randomness does, especially when it leads people to accept as true a reasonable story that is false, when a myth functions as an explanation. And that is what is happening with the way we talk about mental illness and random gun violence. Thankfully, a just published report in the Annals of Epidemiology pulls together the facts we need to consider if we really want to adopt evidence-based policies to reduce random gun violence.

The article, “Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy,” is a comprehensive, critical survey of the available data (and it is surprisingly accessible and  well-written for an academic treatise). It concludes that “most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.”

[ … ]

Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the article in Annals of Epidemiology was quoted in the UCLA Newsroom saying ”but even if schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression were cured, our society’s problem of violence would diminish by only about 4 percent.”

That is not very much. When people with mental illness do act violently it is typically for the same reasons that people without mental illness act violently.

“We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York, says Barry Rosenfeld, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx….

A study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.

That’s a much higher error rate than with most medical tests, says Alan Teo, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently, says Steven Hoge, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. These include a history of violence and a current threat to commit violence ….

And we’ve discussed Dr. Swanson’s views before.  Furthermore, I deny with prejudice that social security recipients who want someone else to handle their finances constitutes mental illness.  Most married couples have one individual who handles the finances, not two.  The entire edifice of regulation was ridiculous in the supperlative anyway.

It was never intended for the protection of anyone.  It was always intended as a trial balloon for gun regulations, first social security recipients, next those who are deemed by the courts as worthy of bans of some sort or another, perhaps because the individual believes in the second amendment, or better, that God gives us our rights and therefore they are as immutable as His nature.

Dr. Swanson has done us yet another service.  He has explained that if the ban for social security recipients is based on the notion of prevention of suicide, then that was always a pretext.  The elderly don’t use guns if they intend on committing suicide.

I won’t outline the details of the Obama executive order for you.  You know the details.  The order included submission of names to the FICS who were social security recipients and who also had someone other than themselves handling their personal finances.

This is a fairly simple thing.  It’s routine for elderly people to have someone acting as power of attorney, and it’s also fairly routine to have someone other than themselves (e.g., their children) who handles personal finances.  This isn’t just commonplace with the elderly.  Seldom do both spouses handle the finances, and seldom do both spouses want to handle the finances.

The Congress has punted this ridiculous order (although why this couldn’t be punted by another executive order, I don’t know).  According to the progressives, the end of the world is upon us.  Consider these quotes.

NJ.com: “It was deemed that the ability to manage one’s own finances was a suitable proxy to identify the severely mentally ill.”

ARSTechnica: “Beneficiaries affected would be those suffering with mental illnesses so severe that they require a representative to manage their finances for them.”

CNN: ” … those who are considered incapable of managing their own disability benefits due mental illness.”

The Sacramento Bee: ” … Obama administration regulation intended to keep guns away from people so mentally disordered that they cannot work, and so depend on Social Security benefits.”

And finally, The Hill: “If your mental impairment is so significant you cannot work and cannot manage money, chances are you cannot safely manage an automatic weapon.”

Forget the fact that retiring to take advantage of social security benefits has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called mental illness.  Forget also the fact that handling finances today requires online presence unfamiliar to many Americans currently on social security.  I seriously doubt the authors of any of these commentaries know anything about the computer they use as a dumb terminal anyway.

Most of them couldn’t code their way through a hand held calculator and are likely only barely able to operate the calculator on their iPhones to multiply two numbers together.  I’d like to see them solve a differential equation, and upon failure perhaps I could cast doubt on their mental readiness to operate a vehicle.

No, these elderly folks are characterized as mentally ill, not only that, severely mentally ill, and moreover, disabled and disordered.

These anti-gun commentaries have become so outlandish that they’re cartoonish and laughable.  One can only suppose that they are receiving their talking points from Everytown or some Bloomberg apparatchik.  They are in good company along with Hamilton Nolan at Gawker who exclaimed:

When you’re old you’re slow as hell and decades of muscle erosion have made you weak. Pretty much any healthy young person can beat you up. Is a gun gonna even things out? Nope. In order for that gun to work you have to pull it out and aim it in a moment of crisis. While you’re fumbling to do that, all slow, a young person is just pushing you on the ground. And taking your gun out of your feeble hands.

Leave the guns to the young nuts, oldie.

Smoothly drawing a gun from a holster, aiming it quickly, and firing it accurately despite the kickback require a level of strength and dexterity that you just don’t have. I’ll lay 5-1 odds that any street criminal can kick you in the knee and chuckle as you roll around on the ground, grasping for the gun you dropped, as they rifle through your purse and then steal your gun, too.

How we treat the weaker among us is as good a metric of our national character as it ever was, perhaps the best possible metric.

One of the commentaries poses the question for a poll.  Should the mentally ill be allowed to have guns?  In my response I refuse to play their game.  Mental maladies have no correspondence to propensity to violence, so says the mental health experts.  The elderly have the right to self defense just as anyone else.

I believe we should restrict gun rights, but only for those who believe that we can define mental health in such a way as to restrict the rights of those we define.  Unprovoked violence has to do with wickedness, not mental illness.  In other words, if you believe that we should take guns away from people based on your definitions of who should have guns and who shouldn’t, I believe you are too dangerous to have guns.

The desire to control the actions of other men is pathological.  Acting on this pathology is wickedness.  I don’t believe you are actionable people for compromise or open discussion if you fall into this category.  You are a danger to society and should have your gun rights restricted.  If you would lord it over other men to control their lives, fortunes, self defense, children, work and other aspects of their lives, you are suitable only as an opponent in battle.

The Atlantic:

After a shooting, once the dust has settled, and the initial shock and panic has abated somewhat, fearful minds begin to cast about for explanations. Given the frequency with which gun deaths occur in the United States, “Why did this happen?” and “Who could do something like this?” are questions the country faces with grim regularity.

Unfortunately, a consistent and dangerous narrative has emerged—an explanation all-too-readily at hand when a mass shooting or other violent tragedy occurs: The perpetrator must have been mentally ill.

“We have a strong responsibility as researchers who study mental illness to try to debunk that myth,” says Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “I say as loudly and as strongly and as frequently as I can, that mental illness is not a very big part of the problem of gun violence in the United States.”

The overwhelming majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, just like the overwhelming majority of all people are not violent. Only 4 percent of the violence—not just gun violence, but any kind—in the United States is attributable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression (the three most-cited mental illnesses in conjunction with violence). In other words, 96 percent of the violence in America has nothing to do with mental illness.

A study from 1998 that followed patients released from psychiatric hospitals found that they were no more prone to violence than other people in their communities—unless they also had a substance abuse problem. So mental illness alone was not a risk factor for violence in this study.

Those are the facts. But cultural narratives are often more powerful than facts, and that 4 percent gets overblown in people’s minds.

It’s all as I have pointed out before (see the extensive links provided).

I don’t think it has anything whatsoever to do with statistics being overblown.  People are generally smarter than that.  The problem is always world and life view, or presuppositions.  If you reject the Biblical account of the origins of evil and the state of mankind, you have to have another explanation.  Psychiatry serves that role, with the mental health physician playing the village witch doctor for the CLEO to decide who gets to have concealed handgun permits. and recommending what kind of laws we have on the books.

To be sure, Mr. Swanson doesn’t have one iota of concern for gun rights.  His concern is for the rights of people who have been diagnosed with mental illness.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It is a legitimate project.  And it’s just as legitimate to speak out protecting gun rights.

But what I want to emphasize is that it’s about more than speaking out for gun rights.  If you have no coherent and compelling world and life view, you’ll be thrown about by the wind.  It’s just as legitimate to say that “the fly on the wall appears to me greenly and that justifies shooting everyone with the last name of Jones every other Thursday” as it is to say that a mental illness had to do with my violence.  If you have no framework for interpretation, you may as well accept the pronouncements of the village witch doctor.

If you believe the Scriptural account of why man does evil, you have an explanation and remedy (temporal and eternal) that isn’t a corollary to any illness mental health professionals may or may not diagnose.  Here I’m trying to treat the root philosophical malady rather than merely trying stomp on people who are confused.  For the statists and collectivists, it’s never about guns.  It’s always and forever about control.  For the soccer mom, it’s about trying to live in a world she doesn’t understand.

If you believe in the duty of self defense, don’t ever make your rights a function of statists or confused soccer moms.  There is enough of both to destroy your liberty.