And there is danger in the air, can you feel it?
"Mental patients are regaining gun rights" July 03, 2011|By Michael Luo, New York Times
PULASKI, Va. - In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face down in his carport “talking gibberish,’’ according to court records. He later told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard and hearing voices.
His family figured French had gone off his medication for bipolar disorder, and a judge ordered him involuntarily committed - the fourth time in five years he had been hospitalized by court order.
When French’s daughter discovered that her father’s commitment meant it was illegal for him to have firearms, she and her husband removed his guns and kept them after French was released in January 2010 on a new regime of mood-stabilizing drugs.
Ten months later, he appeared in General District Court - the body that handles small claims and traffic infractions - to ask a judge to restore his gun rights. After a brief hearing, in which French’s lengthy history of relapses never came up, he walked out with an order reinstating his right to possess firearms.
Now I'm not for mentally unstable people possessing guns, but at the same time I oppose agenda-pushing gun-grabbing by the media and that's what this feels like.
All the "authorities" need do is label you.
Across the country, states are increasingly allowing people like French, who lost their firearm rights because of mental illness, to petition to have them restored.
What if you train a whole bunch of them to occupy foreign lands and commit heinous mass murder among other atrocities?
A handful of states have had such restoration laws on their books for some time, but with little notice....
States have mostly entrusted these decisions to judges, who are often ill-equipped to conduct investigations from the bench. Many seemed willing simply to give petitioners the benefit of the doubt. The results often seem haphazard.
Well, I'm sorry, I know the Anthony verdict has you media types all bunged up but that is our system of jury justice and I'd like to keep it.
At least a few hundred people with histories of mental health issues get their gun rights back each year. The number promises to grow....
The issue goes to the heart of the nation’s complicated relationship with guns, testing the delicate balance between the need to safeguard the public and the dictates of what the Supreme Court has proclaimed to be a fundamental constitutional right.
The founders intended the citizens to be armed because they saw the tyranny of government up close.
In case after case examined by The New York Times, judges made decisions without important information about an applicant’s mental health....
Now you know what the NYT has been up to lately?
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