U.S. Appeals Court says that just because you once had a mental illness problem doesn't allow government to ban you for life from owning guns

The risk of violence from people with mental illness is extremely low to begin with, but if the risk is low even when people are suffering a mental illness, why ban them for ever from owning a gun, even after they are cured?  From the Wall Street Journal:

In the first legal ruling of its type, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati on Thursday deemed unconstitutional a federal law that kept a Michigan man who was briefly committed to a mental institution decades ago from owning a gun. 

A three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the federal ban on gun ownership for anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution” violated the Second Amendment rights of Clifford Charles Tyler, a 73-year-old Hillsdale County man. 

“The government’s interest in keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill is not sufficiently related to depriving the mentally healthy, who had a distant episode of commitment, of their constitutional rights,” wrote Judge Danny Boggs, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, for the panel. 

Lucas McCarthy, Mr. Tyler’s lawyer, called the ruling “a forceful decision to protect Second Amendment rights,” and said he hoped it that it would have “a significant impact on the jurisprudence in the area of gun rights.” . . .

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Do you want an idea of how difficult it is to use mental health screening to figure out who is going to engage in these mass public shootings?

If you are interested in some numbers on how hard it is to accurately screen out those who are a real danger to others, check out this link.

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Do mentally ill, multiple victim killers purposefully pick targets where victims are most vulnerable?: The case of Elliot Rodger

For gun control advocates who actually read the Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, they will be in for some real surprises.  There appears to be real evidence that he picked the place to attack precisely because he didn't think that the victims would be defended.  

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Obama continues to push only mental illness solutions at Fort Hood memorial

Obama's talk at the April 9th memorial at Fort Hood again emphasized only mental illness.

In our open society, in advanced bases like this, we can never eliminate every risk, but as a nation, we can do more to help counsel those with mental health issues, to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are having such deep difficulties. As a military, we must continue to do everything in our power to secure our facilities and spare others this pain. . . .

The question is: what happens if you can't accurately identify all the threats due to mental illness?  What happens if the threat is something other than mental illness?

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Obama focuses on mental health but doesn't ask what we do when the screening fails

The Obama administration's push is for further mental health screening.  But many of these mass shooters were seeing psychiatric care and still not identified as showing a "sign of any likely violence either to himself or others."  That was again the case with Ivan Lopez.  The Washington Post reports:

But the Army psychiatrist who last saw Lopez found no “sign of likely violence, either to himself or to others,” McHugh told a Senate panel. . . .

Monday morning quarterbacking is so easy.  What may have been relatively trivial events gain so much more meaning after an attack has occurred. 

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