The 23 steps Obama outlined today to reduce gun violence focus on three areas: background checks, increased availability of mental health care to people who need it and government correlation of the two to deny guns to people who should not have them.
All commendable objectives.
Background checks can be quite complicated and manpower intensive especially if the cops have to contact mental health providers.
Americans move around quite a lot and doing a background check on one person could involve contacting dozens of jurisdictions and several hospitals and doctors, each of whom will have forms to fill out and clerks to process the sensitive data.
$50 bucks will buy you a criminal background check. The mental health background check is the kicker.
There are huge databases for criminal background checks. There’s not much at all for the mental health angle.
Will being an illegal alien be cause for denial of a gun permit? It should.
There are 250 “sanctuary cities” in the U.S. where it is unlawful to check on a person’s immigration status for any reason. Most major cities are like that. Will all these municipalities get a waiver?
How come living your life beyond the law, as illegals do, will not be a huge black mark against them? Especially with the universal correlation of illegals to the drug cartels?
How do you get a mental health clearance anyway? The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Not many people have ever had a complete mental health checkup. Those that do have every right to be protected from having their medical history accessible to all callers.
$250 will buy you an hour with a psychologist and a battery of psych tests. Who’s going to pay for that? Who sets the standards?
It can take many in-depth interviews to do a thorough psych evaluation and thousands of dollars of psych test evaluations.
You don’t really know if a person is a risk or not unless you go deep. I bet there are already websites showing people how to fool the experts. If you only have to pretend for an hour; hell, that’s easy.
Will these mental health providers be legally liable if somebody they clears commits a crime – ANY crime? Their liability insurance will skyrocket.
Lawyers will make a fortune on suits – and, voila – that much more money is sucked away from cops and their active prosecution of criminals.
How many people are qualified to do these psych evaluations in Spanish? French? German? And all the other languages spoken by legal immigrants who are not fully fluent in English.
Most people who go through this whole process to buy a gun will be given a clean bill of health. Will the government keep their psych tests and evaluations on file forever?
Will these psych tests be accessible to law enforcement in criminal prosecutions at a later date?
Will decent, honest people who live in a bad area of town who want a gun just for personal protection be motivated not to buy one so because the mental health check will ruin their career at the widget factory downtown?
Will this encourage criminals, knowing who has mental health problems, to thus prey on these innocent victims whom they know have no weapons?
Will employers be able to access this database for routine employment applications, like they now use Facebook searches, credit records and google searches?
Can employers, especial federal and state agencies, ask for such a mental health evaluation even if one is not available? Are we creating a whole new class of underprivileged citizens here?
All of this is going to cost a boatload of money, coming from police forces that are already strapped for funds. They will have much less money to spend on actually finding, prosecuting and incarcerating criminals.
For every ten complete gun checks that are done with a full psych write up, one bona fide bad guy goes scott free. What’s the price of that?
We all know that Medicare and Medicaid will be bankrupt in 8 or 10 years. Obamacare isn’t even in full swing yet. Granted, Obamacare mandated full mental health coverage, but it comes at a price.
As far as that goes, who’s going to oversee the psychologists? The new DSM V has hundreds of new diagnoses, some for totally bizarre things like grieving after the death of a loved one or talking back to your parents.
Virtually everybody who gets one of these gun permit interviews will be found to have some kind of mental disorder.
This is kind of like spending $4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight a couple thousand unarmed terrorists.
The wars are over, they are still there, both nations are quickly reverting to their old fundamentalist ways, and the U.S. is left with paying the bills.
I would score this criminals 10, good guys 0.
End of game.
