Is having the conversation about mental illness and horrendous violent crime stigmatizing?

[HereSince1628]

45. There's nothing controversial about that, but that's not REALLY the nature of the concern.

I don't want guns in the hands of dangerous people either. I'm totally in agreement with that sentiment.

But there is more than one twist in the mobius strip of these threads on guns, mental illness and violence.

And when you cut it down the middle you end up with two loops.

Please look at the OTHER loop, the one that has nothing to do with wanting a gun.

It might seem strange but most people familiar with mental illness are not really too very hot about the right to own guns.

We ARE very hot about unreasonably getting our names placed on some national registry that says we are untrustworthy and dangerous because a database program flagged a billing code, or because some pharmacy database says we filled a prescription.

We are afraid of getting our names on lists of untrustworthy and dangerous people. We already face real discrimination. We've got legitimate concerns about facile trampling of constitutional rights, but we are downright terrified about having innocent, unrisky peoples' names on databases of shunned people, because we know how expansion of access and misuse of databases proceeds in the US.