Ask yourself, what if the federal government said that anyone charged as mentally defective can't get a gun, and your state said you actually had to be convicted? Should your state follow federal guidelines and submit your record to the federal government even though you were found competent by a state judge and your case dismissed?
Same principle.
"Federal law prohibits anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective,”
What does that mean? Geez, go through a divorce and child custody battle, be diagnosed with cancer, lose a limb in an auto accident, lose a child, flunk out of school, get fired from your job -- in those situations, you're not mentally fit. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to buy a gun.
As I said in more detail on another thread, we need to make a clear distinction for both legal and medical purposes, between mental illnesses that involve disconnection from reality and/or sociopathic attitude and those that do not. There’s no need to be locking people up for depression, anxiety, attention deficit/hyperactivity, etc., as things like that pose no danger to anyone other than the sufferer (though severe depression is incompatible with having responsibility for a child), and these non-dangerous categories of mental illness account for the vast majority of “mentally ill” in our country. However, the psychotic/schizophrenic/paranoid/sociopathic categories of mental illness are a serious danger to others and warrant lock-up. It’s not really hard to distinguish between the two categories. Regardless of how many conditions from the non-dangerous categories someone may have, the presence of one of the dangerous categories should trigger an adjudication of mental incompetence.
Frankly this is not something that belongs in the area of state law. It involves removal of rights generally accorded to citizens by the Constitution of the United States, and has implications for many types of interstate transactions, including movement of the individual across state lines, whether money transferred to the benefit of the individual (government check, inheritance, or anything else) should go under the control of the individual or a legal guardian, and much more.
My family is going to have to deal with this in preparation for my elderly father’s death (doesn’t appear to be imminent, but he’s 85). I was trying to impress on my father a few days ago the importance of getting a mental incompetence adjudication for my half-sister, who has advanced schizophrenia and has always refused treatment. Although he managed a few years ago to get the state of Texas, where she has long resided in a makeshift tent, to subject her to an involuntary psych exam, there was 1) no follow-through to get a formal adjudication of her mental incompetence and appoint a legal guardian, and 2) the Texas court said that while the court-appointed psychiatrist had given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, privacy laws preventing it from passing this information on to the federal government (meaning no way to qualify her for SSD payments) or other state governments. No one else in the family lives in Texas. When my father dies, she’s entitled by her parents’ divorce decree to 25% of his estate, and that portion will be in 6 figures. Dad is a resident of Virginia, and legally, at this point, if some sleazebag lawyer manages to get her to tell a Virginia court that he (the sleazebag) represents her, and then the sleazebag tells the court she wants her funds transferred to X account in Texas or any other state, the Virginia court has no legal basis to deny that request, and banks and brokerages holding the actual funds in various states have no legal basis to decline to send the funds to wherever the Virginia court tells them to. We simply can’t have people being simultaneously classified as mentally competent in some states and incompetent in others.