Mental Illness and Gun Ownership

[one-eyed fat man]

16. "Identify Prohibited Persons"

At no small expense, the ATF maintains a website that will answer most of your questions.

http://www.atf.gov/firearms/how-to/identify-prohibited-persons.html

"who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;"

That means someone who a judge has classified as an "idiot, imbecile, or moron" as those terms have specific legal meanings or some who has been committed to an asylum or other institution for the insane. Remember, the law was enacted in 1968. Back then families with someone, say like, Jared Loughener, would have gone to the judge and had him put away in state hospital.

One of the places where the laws get sticky are when a person seeks mental health care on his own. When a person is committed against their will by a judge and court order, that result is a judicial record and public. It would normally be available in the FBI database if the state is on the ball. If a person seeks treatment for mental illness on their own now we have to deal with HIPPA and medical privacy laws. In that case the state may actually be prohibited from revealing those records.

Some, such as Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, have proposed that VA and military health records be searched and any combat veteran who has been seen for PTSD be prohibited. That proposal is particularly pernicious as the DoD has been doing mandatory screenings on all personnel returning from deployments for several years now. The most generous reading of her proposal is that all combat veterans need to be prohibited from owning personal firearms.