Author Topic: TX- Proposed Gun Bill Would Prohibit Sales To Mentally Ill (Read 515 times)

FWiedner · « **on:** April 12, 2005, 05:22:42 AM »

Proposed Gun Bill Would Prohibit Sales To Mentally Ill

DALLAS -- A bill presented to the Texas Senate proposes to restrict the sale of firearms to people who have been judged to mentally defective and those who have been committed to a mental institution.

Retailers that sell firearms now have access to criminal histories of potential gun buyers, and the Brady Bill restricts gun sales to have been legally ruled mentally ill. The proposed legislation, Senate Bill 869, would require mental health information to be funneled to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which would make the information available to retailers.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://www.nbc5i.com/news/4368367/detail.html

*FW Note: So who qualifies as "mentally defective"? Alcoholics? People seeking counselling for depression? People who seek advice from their clergymen?

Maybe just those people whose opinions are different or unpopular?

Hey, it worked for the Nazis and the Soviets...

:x

Robert · « **Reply #1 on:** April 12, 2005, 09:42:12 AM »

Well, hell....I think crazy people should get their guns for free. Certainly should not be any restrictions...

doc_kreipke · « **Reply #2 on:** April 12, 2005, 05:10:11 PM »

Sounds as if this would run afoul of the health information act (HIPAA) passed back in '96. The feds are really picky about transfer of medical information, and I would think that the TX DPS & gun retailers wouldn't be authorized recipients of an individual's private health records, including those concerning mental health.

fe352v8 · « **Reply #3 on:** April 12, 2005, 06:56:49 PM »

Hard to believe that members of the Texas legislature would cause themselves to be ineligible to posses a gun.

Life is no joke but funny things happen

jon

Greysky · « **Reply #4 on:** April 13, 2005, 02:23:26 AM »

Quote from: doc_kreipke

Sounds as if this would run afoul of the health information act (HIPAA) passed back in '96. The feds are really picky about transfer of medical information, and I would think that the TX DPS & gun retailers wouldn't be authorized recipients of an individual's private health records, including those concerning mental health.

Ah, but this is just another ploy by gun grabbers to thin the ranks of legitimate gun owners. These zealots "feel" they have a holy mission to disarm every American citizen. They don't care if their tactics violate individual rights, or exceed the bounderies of common sense.

I fear we have entered an age of paranoid suspicion in which an individual no longer has to actually commit some form of criminal act to be deemed guilty of such action. Preemptive intervention is being used not only on an international level to violate the sovereignty of individual nations, it is also being used against school students to "weed out" those suspected of harboring thoughts of aggressive violence, such as little Billy who likes to draw pictures of firearms in his notebook. Now, these highly questionable tactics are being employed against adult individuals in a vain, but diligent effort to determine their possible intentions. And this all started with the faulty concept of criminal profiling.

I have a few questions that the powers that be don't want asked by those who are supposed to believe everything they hear on the evening news: Just who the hell are these self-righteous witch hunters who profess to have a handle on the future behavior of everyone else? What makes their motives so pure? And who is monitoring their behavior?

williamlayton · « **Reply #5 on:** April 13, 2005, 10:49:59 AM »

I'm not deficient, don't call me that name, :evil: I want another gun.
Blessings

Don Fischer · « **Reply #6 on:** April 13, 2005, 02:46:19 PM »

This could be more serious than you know. With a law like that here in Ore, I could not own a firearm. I have clinical depression which is a mental illness. Every ten or twelve years I have to go on special drugs to straighten out. I have other ways, all legal, of dealing with it in the meantime. I would bet that a good percentage of the people on this site also suffer from it, weather they know it or not or will even admit it. It's very controllable but the stigma attached to "mental illness" keeps many from talking of it or even dealing with it. In truth, it's little worse than a common cold and much more treatable when the person afflicted with it shrugs off the bonds of the stigma.

One of my best friends spent two tours in Vietnam as a field medic. He has PTSD and clinical depression. He hunts and shoots and he's no danger to anyone. When I was training dogs, I had a couple clients with bi-polar disorder. They took their medicine and you could not tell. It's the stigma attached to mental illness that causes more problems than anything and leads to many people not getting a handle on it. In truth it is no different than many illnesses that require the taking of drugs to control it, ie: diabetes, which I also have, high blood pressure ect.

Where the problem comes in is they pass a law stating mental illness and all of a sudden every form of mental illness gets lumped into the law. That would be a bad law as many people that are no danger to anyone would be lumped into the description.