Assault Weapons Ban Lacks Democratic Votes to Pass Senate

[RiverNoord]

61. Some kind of 'national database' for the 'mentally ill' is absurd and would be a remarkable setback

for the treatment of people who are actually mentally ill.

There are a great many people who meet critera at some point in their lives for diagnosis as being mentally ill.

Almost none of them are in any way violent, and many mental illnesses and emotional disorders actually radically reduce any tendency toward aggressive behavior.

Paranoid schizophrenics should probably not have access to firearms. They deal with a high risk of suicide to begin with, and firearms increase that risk considerably. There aren't many paranoid schizophrenics and most lack the real-world planning skills to conduct a mass shooting.

Severe manic depressives deal with high suicide risk in their depressive state and some may have potential to harm others in severe manic states. Not such good candidates for access to firearms. There aren't many severe manic depressives, and their planning skills are severely impaired while in manic states.

People with sociopathic tendencies, which means they tend to have little capacity for sympathy for other human beings emotional states, probably shouldn't have access to firearms. Unfortunately, sociopaths are highly successful in our society, and many CEOs of major corporations exhibit sociopathic characteristics. It's usually sociopaths who have minimal capacity for compassion and a high level of focus on 'wrongs' being done to them that engage in mass shootings. They're not 'mentally ill' - they just have relatively uncommon set of traits (but not nearly as uncommon as, say, truly chronically mentally ill people such as schizophrenics or severe manic depressives) that result in the potential for engaging in extremely violent acts against large groups of people. Sociopaths don't see anything wrong with themselves and are very unlikely to be identified as 'mentally ill' by those who know them.

What would a national 'database' (which would force mental health workers to violate their oaths regarding confidentiality) do, except re-stigmatize conditions that rarely result in violence and keep people who may recognize a need for treatment away from it? Its the access to the guns that make it easy for the wrong sociopath to engage in episodes of mass violence, and for some reason a national database of gun owners and ammunition purchases is furiously resisted by many of the same people who call for some nonsense database of the mentally ill?