Re: Congress Says, Let the Mentally Ill Buy Guns
No, the GOP Did Not Just Repeal the Background Check System or Give Guns to the Mentally Il | National Review
There were a host of reasons to object to this measure. On separation-of-powers grounds, the prospect of the Social Security Administration playing judge, jury, and executioner is flatly intolerable. On due process grounds, there was nothing to recommend the measure (as the ACLU made abundantly clear in its opposition letter). On statutory grounds, it seems clear that the SSA was acting ultra vires. And, as political matter, the vacillation of the Obama administration — which insisted simultaneously that “incidents of violence continue to highlight a crisis in America’s mental health system” and that it was “not attempting to imply a connection between mental illness and a propensity for violence, particularly gun violence” — was downright embarrassing. But one does not have to agree with me on process or in outlook to see that as a matter of positive policy, the idea was a terrible one. As Yale’s Dr. Mark Rosen observed when the rule was first adumbrated, the link between financial acumen and mental illness is extraordinarily weak: “Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe,” said Dr. Marc Rosen, a Yale psychiatrist who has studied how veterans with mental health problems manage their money. “They are very different determinations."
It is for this lattermost reason — not from any great fidelity to the Second Amendment — that so many organizations urged the GOP to act. As the House Ways and Means Committee was sure to make clear, letters of support were received from ADAPT, which “urged Congress to use the Congressional Rule Act to repeal this rule“; from the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pressed Congress “to support a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to disapprove the Final Rule issued by the Social Security Administration (SSA)”; from the ACLU, which pushed “members of the House of Representatives to support the resolution disapproving the final rule of the Social Security Administration”; from The Arc of the United States, which asked “Congress to act, through the CRA process, to disapprove this new rule”; from the Association of Mature American Citizens, which exhorted “Congress to quickly pass this Joint Resolution and restore the basic Second Amendment rights this rule has abridged”; from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, which implored “Congress to act, through the CRA process, to disapprove this new rule and prevent the damage that it inflicts on the disability community”; and, in addition, from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, the Disability Law Center of Alaska, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Directors, the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy, the National Association for Rural Mental Health, the National Council on Disability, the National Council of Independent Living, the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery, the National Disability Leadership Alliance, the National Disability Rights Network, the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, and Safari Club International. All of them — every single one — urged that the rule be killed.
Wow, even ACLU?
