You are exactly right. And I am getting very weary of those on the Right, setting up a false dichotomy between the stupidity of the Left's anti-gun position and the idea that increased scrutiny of the mentally "ill" is the best approach to solving the problem.
Wayne LaPierre (head of the NRA) has repeatedly called for "an active national database of the mentally ill." On the face of it, there is something reasonable about that. But the problem starts when you start to draw the line on what constitutes a severe enough psychological disorder to get someone listed in the database. Is it just the paranoid schizophrenic? How about people with other dissociative disorders, or an oppositionally defiant child, or perhaps just ADHD? Depression? Bi-polar? Generalized anxiety disorder? Maybe impulse control issues, say pyromania or intermittent explosive disorder? Perhaps a pathological gambler or an overeater wouldn't make the list, but those are similar kinds of impulse control issues.
The problem is that the government would look to the American Psychiatric Association for guidance. Those are the same folks who (under political pressure) decided to remove homosexual behavior from it's list of disorders, and who consider sexual re-assignment surgery to be a procedure that the state should pay for in the case of prisoners. Sadly the APA has become too politically correct, who is to say what they would recommend as a threshold disorder, sufficient to land someone in the database?
Even worse it the not-so-far-fetched possibility that the government will simply come up with their own list—in consultation with white-coated experts, of course. But when the government does it, real problems ensue. You are right, this does begin to sound like the mental hygiene programs in Germany. And we should never forget the approach that was taken in the old Soviet Union (that may not have been changed today).
A crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in a Communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offences, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal.--Nikita Kruschev
The Left is clearly using this so-called crisis as an excuse to go after guns. Don't think for a moment that they will not use is as a way to start down the road of marginalizing whole classes of people until it becomes possible to simply make dissent a mental illness.
Thank you, newheart. I appreciate your comments. Bipolar is largely considered to be one of the more dangerous and unpredictable disorders—but I have known enough of them to know that it doesn’t automatically mean you are a killer. And I am managing my illness very well.
Also, there are plenty of non-violent schizophrenics. Non-violent paranoid schizophrenics. Mainstream media paints mentally ill people as these horrible criminals, but that’s not the case for all of them. Just like a lot of ‘normal’ people commit crimes, so do a lot of mentally ill.
Thanks again for your thoughts, I appreciate them. Because that is exactly the slippery slope such a registry would create.