I worry about who gets to determine who is a mental defective. The left in this country would label most anyone on the right as mental defective and dangerous. I don’t see anything in the Second Amendment that limits anyone from owning a gun by whatever means possible. The problem still comes from the misuse of the gun and not the possession.
Well... the exact “who” varies from state to state, but basically if a judge signs off on the evaluation by the board/psychiatrist/whatever that you are a danger to yourself and/or others, you cannot own a gun. Such a hearing requires that you have counsel present - as it is much like a trial in that one of the outcomes is the potential removal of your rights.
I don’t think that impractical, extreme interpretations of the Second Amendment do anything to advance its noble purposes. The framers’ outside writings on the topic of who should have the right to bear arms, in some cases stated clearly that felons and the insane did not have this right, and in all cases were written in the context of a society where common sense still ruled the day. And common sense dictates that felons (real ones, not some of the modern administrative “felonies” that have been invented by socialists) and the mentally incompetent have no business owning, possessing, or using guns. Should a person with advanced Alzheimer’s who can no longer reliably recognize family members or distinguish them from complete strangers, really have an unfettered right to go out and buy a gun and keep it at home for “self-defense”? How would that work when the person can’t distinguish an intruder from a spouse or a home nursing aide? What about a severely autistic young man who’s given to violent outbursts, but has obviously not been charged with any crimes for those outbursts due to his clear inability to control himself?
It is well-established law that ALL rights are subject to being revoked from individuals after due process — even the right to continue living, since the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights lived in an era when the death penalty was almost universally accepted as form of legal punishment, and did not choose to prohibit it. The process of individual adjudication, whether for crimes or mental competence or anything else, will never be perfect, but so far no one has invented a better system for maintaining a peaceful and prosperous society.
Probably the same people who get to determine who is a child predator, and has to register as such for life. I would think that being a child predator is a sub-set of being a mental defective, after all.