OK, so my last idea was not well received

[HereSince1628]

47. I think focus on mental illness is mostly wrongheaded and hugely reliant on bigotry

rather than rhetoric remotely close to objective empirically based understanding of cause and effect

Solutions have to be found that deal with both..The parsed interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that guarantees the presence of guns in our culture... and ...the legitimate protections of the 14th amendment that preclude us from prior restraints that are over broad and violate rights to equal protection of innocent people in an attempt to get at the 1 in several 100,000s loosely associated with that class who should be restrained from gun possession.

The current solution is to have courts, or appointees of the court, make individual decisions about the risk of dangerousness to self and others, which are the basis for federal limits on gun ownership. But there are also variations about what constitutes a sufficiently dangerous mental illness to justify denial of gun possession. Some states are very specific some are not (some of the specifics are very poorly justified, imo, but if you are interested you could look at the Smart Gun Laws website).

We ought to be paying researchers to at least look at how these things work in the natural political experiments that are the states and territories. But currently we can't because federal spending on the background needed to develop smart laws is banned.