Overreach: The gun control bill lets doctors put your name in the national criminal background check system without telling you. Can the government say you're crazy and take your guns? It's already happening.
The road to deeper gun control seems like another road paved with good intentions. Since many recent mass shootings have involved shooters with varying degrees of mental impairment, the desire to keep guns out of the genuinely mentally ill seems to be a worthy goal.
Yet it is being exploited with definitions so vague and undefined, and with controls so lax, as to become not a means of ensuring public safety but to fulfill an ideological agenda that sacrifices a fundamental liberty in the name of securing a marginal degree of safety.
The Toomey-Manchin proposal contains a provision that lets a doctor add a patient to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) without ever telling the patient he or she has been added.
This would seem to violate doctor-patient confidentiality, due process and the presumption of innocence in one fell swoop.
As the Heritage Foundation reports, this "gun control legislation eliminates any (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy protection for mental health records in connection with the NICS system, leaving only what privacy protection the attorney general cares to provide."
In other words, protection of your medical privacy and gun rights enshrined into law would be removed and put into the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder.
We have written how under New York's SAFE Act, mental health records are being cross-checked with the names of gun permit holders.
New York state resident David Lewis, a 34-year-old college librarian, recently had his pistol permit taken away on the grounds that a check of health records showed he once took anxiety medication.
Under New York's SAFE Act, it seems doctor-client privilege and the Second Amendment are null and void. Under that law, guns may be confiscated when a permit holder or someone trying to get a pistol permit is receiving mental health treatment or taking medication and is "likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others."
What "likely" means and who gets to make that arbitrary determination is key.
Lynette Phillips of Upland, Calif., knows where this slippery slope can lead. She had legally purchased a gun years ago for her husband, David, as a present.
That gun and two others registered to her husband (who does not have a history of felonies or mental illness) were seized by police from the California Department of Justice wearing bulletproof vests and carrying Glocks.
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/041613-652128-mental-health-exploited-for-gun-control.htm#ixzz2QnKI5Q7C
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook
credits about this article: Investor's Business Daily, April 16, 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment