Posted on 07/26/2015 5:51:28 AM PDT by Zakeet
John Russell Houser was deeply troubled long before he shot 11 people in a movie theater in Louisiana, but decades of mental problems didn't keep him from buying the handgun he used.
Despite obvious and public signs of mental illness — most importantly, a Georgia judge's order committing him to mental health treatment against his will as a danger to himself and others in 2008 — Houser was able to walk into an Alabama pawn shop six years later and buy a .40-caliber handgun.
[Snip]
Court records reviewed by The Associated Press strongly suggest Houser should have been reported to the state and federal databases used to keep people with serious mental illnesses from buying firearms, legal experts said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I have a few answers that’ll solve this problem for the most part.
1. Allow everyone to own firearms and implement national Constitutional Carry. If criminals and nutbars want to mis-use their firearms they can go right ahead, but they’ll receive an instant death penalty. And if they get away a warrant and a bounty will be placed on their heads. If they resist being arrested the result is an instant death penalty. Implement a national death penalty for the court system.
2. Outlaw all gun-free zones except the court system.
3. Require all homeowners to own a firearm (ala Kennesaw, Georgia 1985).
4. Repeal the ban on full-auto firearms.
5. Repeal the ban on firearms suppressors.
6. Implement firearms safety courses in government schools taught by volunteers from the NRA. The social studies teachers can teach the other aspects of firearms history and the real reasons for the citizenry to own, carry and use and the results from that.
7. Have a national firearms safety, training, and learning day on July 5th.
Feel free to add to this list.
Looks like a cross between Sinatra and an aged Shepard Smith.
I'm not sure that "mental health" records are included under the "Hippa" regulations or not but in general Hippa covers access to your health care (lab work, x-rays, cat scans, MRI data, prescription history, &c). I know I have to sign a release to obtain a copy of the results of a blood test.
Things may have changed since Obamacare mandated that all health records be collected in a digital format. I would hope that mental health data was held to the same standard as your physical health. However, I'm sure the health insurance carriers would just love to get their hands on all the "private" records so they could "adjust" rates dependent on your condition...
Regards,
GtG
All good points. It’s hard to say on this case right now. Ergo, my calling for more discovery on this.
Regards,
GtG
PS Your list sounds like a good start, maybe a tad ambitious...
G
So instead of enforcing the law ... the remedy is more gun control laws? (And more taxes?)
The color of the sky?
Ummm....
Mostly gray with some blue in it.
Why?
“Is it me, or does anyone else think Houser look a little like Frank Sinatra?”
Yes, they’re both dead! Dead people tend to look alike!
More proof that the background check system is a gun-owner registry first and foremost. Blocking purchases to disqualified individuals requires state and local government workers to actually do some work, so that part is of secondary, occasional importance.
“2. Outlaw all gun-free zones except the court system.”
Why gun-free court system? The Hillsdale, MI court system removed the “gun-free” sign from the court house because it violated state law and the 2nd amendment.
“At a time when even nail files and pocket knives are barred from courts, Hillsdale County has reopened its historic courthouse to citizens who legally pack weapons.
Circuit Judge Michael Smith recently ordered the “no guns” signs removed at the courthouse in downtown Hillsdale, saying the ban is against state law.
Smith said that courthouses are not exempt from state concealed-weapons laws, so there’s no way to lawfully stop people from carrying a concealed weapon if they’re licensed properly.”
http://blog.mlive.com/citpat/2008/06/judge_lifts_gun_ban_in_courts.html
Too funny.
My (late) husband was bipolar and an alcoholic. He was, for the most part, a distant, selfish man who would let nothing in his way to get that next drink. Yet he did have some nice qualities, ok, rare, but sometimes....and he was a jolly drunk. Not mean when he drank.
Then he stopped drinking. He attended AA and achieved sobriety. for about 4 years. He was struck by a truck on his motorcycle by an old man that wasn’t watching and turned in front of him. Bill, my husband, hit the truck with his left side and flew over the hood and landed on his head. Full face helmet, no obvious trauma to his head, just a broken hip. fine, right? Then he got worse and just ...crazier, by the year. Diagnosed bipolar the next year (oh THAT’S what that was all those years) but his bipolar got worse each year for a couple of years. By 2006 he was worse every month. We separated in late 2006, he had gone really off the deep end. That’s when he started drinking again. Stalked me, me and the two kids left at home lived in fear that he was going to kill me. I know he wanted to, maybe there was something decent left inside him though, he didn’t kill me or the kids. He’d started drinking and porn and stalking me while we were separated. He got so scary that the police, when he’d show up and I had to call them, and our lawyers, were afraid for me to go near him. He was obsessed with me, so I would run and stay inside when the deputies came. In and out of the mental ward at the hospital, they made him give up his guns. THEY MADE HIM GIVE UP HIS GUNS. Why didn’t they prohibit him from having them at all?????? In any case, in 2008 he told a coworker that it had just gotten too hard. And he took the day off and shot himself in the head with a gun he’d just gotten from a pawn shop that day. Thursday. March 6. They didn’t find his body until the 10th. The cop that answered the call mercifully took care of the mattress and bedding after they’d taken his body out of his apt. His children were friends with our children so he knew this was Nathan’s father lying there. They pretend that background check does any good. It doesn’t do any good. I’m VERY thankful that I’m safe. And that my children are safe, but this was terrible. Horrible. I actually don’t know that I would have made it through this without a very few people. One of whom was FReeper Null and Void. Saved me when I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it. Hard, hard, hard on us. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was for Bill to do this. I didn’t want him back, I feared and loathed him by that time. But I didn’t want him to die and my kids....they were just wrecked.
Must not be in GA, see my post right before this one. They made Bill go in, and he still bought a new gun and offed himself.
Sometimes I think I would like to run into that old man, Martin Fear, that struck Bill and tell him just what he did to my family. Indirectly, he killed Bill.
We had a friend that knew him and our friend Charles asked us not to sue him, he was a nice guy. That would show him Christ, he said. Like ruining our family was a road to Christ. Not that my family was so great, with Bill in it, but we limped along, all those years. And good or bad, it was mine. Martin Fear hid his assets and Bill got next to nothing for his pain and trouble. and yes, I struggle with feelings of resentment, maybe even hatred, for good ole Martin.
Results: This killer in Lafayette passed a background check. The killer at the Charleston church passed a background check. The Colorado movie theater shooter passed a background check. The Tuscon killer passed a background check. The killer at the Navy shipyard passed a background check. The Virginia Tech killer passed a background check.
And the liberal/progressive remedy for all that? Why, universal background checks, of course.
I’m not for the government requiring me to buy or own anything, thank you.
I am so very sorry for your terrible experience
I believe that the mentally ill who are not pure evil are embraced by God when they walk into the light
A priest ( Rollheiser..?) wrote a very good article about how suicide victims are “ too bruised to be touched” in their mental illness and they throw themselves out of their living agony like someone throws themselves out of a burning car
Only God can reach through and touch them and He does
Well then he's in real trouble now.
Ronrolheiser.com
“When someone is too bruised to be touched”
Now, I don’t hold the absolute innocence of a soul evil enough to murder innocents no matter what his mental state
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