Replies

Obviously if you have a “mentally ill” person living in your home, you should not have firearms.

Likewise if you have a “mentally ill” person in your apartment building.

To prevent a “mentally ill” person in your neighborhood from gaining access to firearms through burglary, you should not have firearms.

At a minimum you might be OK with a Class 5 safe with electronic dial, with 24/7 monitoring by an alarm company. unless you ever took an antidepressant or said “I am anxious” to an MD.

My sister has schizophrenia. She hears voices telling her to do things. While married to a man with about 50 guns and a carry instructor, she had a particularly bad time. She pulled a gun on a cop and was arrested and held for 3 days to see if she was a danger to herself or someone else. THEY LET HER COME HOME! Her husband left her and she basically became homeless. She moved in with my mother later and lived there for a couple of years. I told my mother she need to get some help, but mom said she could handle it. She griped to a neighbor about something and called the cops. The police showed up and she began to fight with the police. They again held her for 3 days. She called mom to come get her and they let her go again.

My mom later had a stroke and died and my sister had no place to live again. Mom's house was repo'd and I got to go clean the house out. In my sister's room, she had 2 pistols the whole time she lived with my mom. It was a miracle, IMO, that they were never used.

I'm as Second Amendment as you can get, but there needs to be something done for the mentally ill. No one could handle her and she would have had to admit herself into an institution. I couldn't do it, her sons couldn't do it, or her mother couldn't do it.

I'm old enough to remember when you could have someone "put away". It was abused to some extent and the places were straight out of hell. But today, the opposite is true. You can't get anyone committed and if you do, they are full.

Today, my sister is in government housing on her Social Security. I don't trust her with a butter knife but she is allowed to live in an apartment on her own. She won't go to a doctor for fear they will poison her and her sons have almost nothing to do with her. Luckily she doesn't have the money to go to a gun store to get a gun. I'm not sure if her mental illness diagnoses would even show on a background check. She's never been hospitalized for her condition, it was just on a doctor's evaluation at the jail.

As gun owners, if we don't do something in this area, we will lose our rights. People that have no feelings or can't discern what they feel will murder again. There are more and more mentally ill people coming up than ever before. I hate the idea of the government diagnosing whether or not I can defend myself, but I don't have an alternative. To allow the mentally ill to have access to weapons of any type is just asking for it. It won't surprise me if I get a call that my sister has stuck a butcher knife into one of her neighbors because God told her they was a demon. How would you like living next to that because you were poor?

No one is more pro-Second Amendment than I am. But seriously mentally ill people should not have unencumbered access to guns, for the same reason they should not have unsupervised access to knives or alcohol. Common sense dictates otherwise.

The problem is that "mental illness" is subject to abusive definition at the hands of an oppressive government (see: the history of any communist autocracy, where mere political opposition was adduced as evidence of "mental illness").

Our present Federal government is not to be trusted in this respect, and I would include many members of both parties in that group. But local authorities in large measure still can be trusted, and that is the level at which such decisions ought to be made.