PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Senators criticize plan to keep mentally ill from getting guns :: 04/30/2016
WASHINGTON — Vietnam veteran Robert Hall, 64, said noises trigger his post-traumatic stress disorder. But he wouldn't hurt anybody, he said.
“If there’s a loud clap of thunder, I’m looking for a table to dive under. It’s instinct,” he said.
Still, because the Department of Veterans Affairs requires that someone else handle his finances, he cannot buy a gun.
Hall and others with such representatives are automatically entered in a national criminal background check system. Tens of thousands of Social Security recipients with mental illness may soon join them and face new restrictions on buying firearms.
The expansion of the database raises the complex issue of how — and when — to keep the mentally ill from getting guns.
Gun control groups say more should be done to keep firearms out of the hands of those with mental illness.
But groups such as the National Rifle Association and advocates for the mentally ill say the Social Security proposal infringes upon the rights of people who will lose access to guns even though no evidence shows them to be dangerous.
At President Barack Obama’s direction, the Social Security Administration on Friday announced a proposal to expand the database of people prohibited from buying guns with the names of beneficiaries whom it has found incompetent to handle their own financial affairs.
It has said 75,000 recipients of Social Security benefits are in that situation. Veterans Affairs already reports people with financial representatives to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
The move to widen the database comes as the Obama administration and Congress still try to figure out how to prevent high-profile shootings involving the mentally ill, such as the 2007 killing of 32 people at Virginia Tech.
The Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, had been declared mentally incompetent but was not added to the database.
Some advocates say the change is a further attempt to restrict gun rights.
"This fits a pattern of abuse within the Obama administration, which has a clear distain for the Second Amendment,” said NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen in a statement. "This is a gun grab, plain and simple."
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, introduced a bill this month to block the rules on Social Security recipients and restore gun rights to veterans who’ve been declared to mentally incompetent to handle their affairs.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, tried unsuccessfully to add language to the Veterans Affairs budget that would prohibit veterans deemed mentally ill from being placed in the database. It’s unclear whether his proposal will be brought up again in a year when Congress is not expected to do much because of the elections.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives defines who should be included in the database as those with marked subnormal intelligence or mental illness, who are a danger to themselves or others, or who lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs.
There’s a big difference between deciding someone cannot handle their finances and saying they’re dangerous, Grassley and Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Georgia, wrote in a letter to Veterans Affairs in March.
From our partners: Opinion Journal: Mental Health Reform Mess
Hall, the veteran from Pueblo, Colorado, insists that he can handle his own affairs. He said he never had a chance to defend himself before being appointed a payee.
He’s appealing that decision to Veterans Affairs, but he’s already in the background check database.
“I can understand if they had criteria like, ‘Is this person a danger to themselves or to other people?’ But I’ve never done anything like that,” he said.
Paul's bill only allows gun rights to be taken from veterans or Social Security recipients who are found mentally incompetent or who are committed to a psychiatric hospital.
And, then, access to guns may only be removed after a hearing, when the person involved has had access to an attorney.
The Social Security Administration said its proposed rule would notify those who may be entered in the database of appeals procedures before their names are submitted.
The agency did not disclose further details.
Po Murray, chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, has criticized attempts to stop the expansion of the database.
“Congress should do more to keep the guns out of the hands of Americans with mental illness, not less,” emailed Murray, whose group was founded after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.
But Ron Honberg, senior policy advisor for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said restricting rights should be linked to the potential for danger.
“It’s not so easy to figure out how you predict danger," he said.
Most with mental illnesses are not dangerous, he said, although the chances of violence increase if alcohol and drug use are involved.
Being deemed in need of a financial representative doesn’t mean the person is dangerous, he added.
Honberg worried that the possibility of being placed in the background check database may deter some from seeking psychiatric help.
“We don’t seem to be getting very far as a country with getting a broad policy on gun control. It’s such a divisive issue,” he said. “It feels, in a way, people with mental illnesses are being used as a proxy here.”
