Assault Weapons Ban Lacks Democratic Votes to Pass Senate

[RiverNoord]

71. Sorry - I wrote it when I was pretty tired. Here's what I mean...

But first, the concept that mental health professionals (very few of them are doctors), should report people they conclude might be, for a period of time, a danger to themselves or others, to any kind of authority maintaining a central national or state database, is hopelessly flawed. Currently, ethics rules normally allow a practitioner to voluntarily notify law enforcement or other parties (it's usually an emergency contact first, if the person provided one, which is often required by the practitioner) under such circumstances. The matter seldom escalates beyond the notification of the emergency contact, but sometimes there will be police involvement, leading to likely police reports, and, if the situation is really a mess, emergency involuntary commitment, perhaps an arrest, and/or charges and prosecution.

The thing is, mental health practitioners generally consider themselves professionals, and most are also in private practice in one way or another, making them businesspeople as well. The entire point of confidentiality, a critical cornerstone of all medical and (especially) mental health practice, is enabling the parties to trust practitioners with information they would not wish to become public, so that the practitioners may have access to potentially intimate information necessary for them to do their jobs. A 'national database notice' would have to be on the first paperwork filled out by anyone seeking medical or mental health services, ensuring that vast numbers of people would simply turn away immediately from mental health practitioners. Most who seek mental health services are very sensitive about sharing with anyone, including the mental health practitioner, information about why they are seeking mental health services to begin with. The idea that they might end up in a 'national database of loonies' would guarantee that many if not most would simply turn away rather than trust that the particular practitioner's judgment of what constitutes a genuine 'risk to themselves or others.' The bottom line is, the whole thing wouldn't work - not with any permutation or adjustment or safeguards that might be devised. The delivery of mental health services in the country would collapse, and the very people who should be seeking help to prevent mental health-related violence never would.

Now - what I was trying to say in my previous post is this:

Almost everyone can agree with a simple statement such as this: Mentally ill people should not have easy access to guns.

The statement is simple - but actually keeping guns out of the hands of 'mentally ill' people is virtually impossible, so long as guns are readily and easily acquired throughout society in general.

The experience of agreeing to such a statement provides many people with a sense that they, in some way, are contributing to a solution to the problems of gun violence. After all, if enough people are discussing the issue, doesn't that mean that something will probably get done about it? Obviously, to massacre a whole bunch of people, especially children, you've got to be mentally ill, right? (Would the person have actually met any criterion for a proper diagnosis of a particular mental health disorder? - well, let's not get bogged down in that sort of stuff - they were obviously nuts - the after the fact reality of the situation proves it.)

So... Gun violence is pretty bad in our society, and the really bad stuff is obviously done by people who are mentally ill, right. So if we just keep guns away from mentally ill people, the really bad stuff won't happen. Problem solved - no more need to deal with stuff we can't agree on, such as the legal proliferation of semi- or full- automatic weapons with extremely high-capacity magazines that can turn a single person into a death machine.

So - the bottom line of my argument is simple - it's easy to get distracted from a difficult question by the promise of an easy answer. Hell, it's American politics 101 - we don't talk about real resolutions to problems, which might be inconvenient to the wealthy interests that really run the show, or to people in general (if global warming is really a serious problem, then we should do something about it! Huh? What do you mean that I should take a bus across town instead of just getting in my car? Who are you to tell me what should and shouldn't do? It's my car and I'm going to drive it - in fact, I'll drive it even more because you told me I shouldn't!) Instead we just have a bunch of people yelling at each other about how the problem is really the fault of this or that party on the 'other side.' Real solutions to issues such as gun violence are messy and difficult (reducing gun violence simply boils down to having way fewer guns around, meaning effective prohibitions on sales/purchases of lots of guns, which is a very, very messy matter indeed).

Hope that clarifies what I meant .