Are there no gunnies who read Cap’n Ed? I wonder this because of a post he did on the topic of Troy Scheffler and Hamline University in the wake of the VTech murders.
In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.
Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.
“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”
(snip)
But after the Virginia Tech massacre, school administrators across the country were ramping up security. Flip to any cable news channel and you’d hear experts talking about warning signs that had been missed. Cho had a history of threatening behavior and stalking. And a psychological evaluation had deemed him a threat to himself.
So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he’d been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he’d have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.
In the comments of a post shortly after the Vtech murders, David and I got into a discussion about a couple of bills sitting before the Congress that would apply to the states giving records of mental health patients to the feds to be included in the NICS check system.
I was of the opinion that this was a slippery slope of sorts, in that once the feds have their hands on the records, they could start multiplying the number of conditions that would cause a denial of purchase. My case was that people used to get “The Winter Blahs”, but over just the past decade or so, becoming bummed about overcast skies day-after-day is now classified as “Seasonal Depression”.
And, of course, there is medication for it.
David took a second look at the bills he pointed out in his post and, using his superior legal-eagle mind to read through the legalese, saw that “Outpatient Treatment” was listed as a reason to deny someone the purchase of a firearm.
“Outpatient Treatment” is usually defined as what folks go through who have completed their voluntary or involuntary stay in a mental heath facility. But who is to say what the legal definition of “Outpatient Treatment” would mean in, say, California or Texas. It could mean the above definition, or it could mean a weekly visit to a therapist for “Seasonal Depression”.
Or, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Or having Ritalin forced upon you as a minor.
And once a law of such wording becomes law, you can bet that states like California, Massachusettes and Illinois would be going to court to get the most vague definition of “Outpatient Treatment” used as the rule. Also, none of these bills had any mention of how long ago you had to have left “Outpatient Treatment” before your 2nd Amendment civil rights could be restored, if ever, that I could see. The language on Form 4473, Question 12-F, asks uses the word “EVER”, so I am to take that if someone has EVER seen a therapist, they could count their civil rights gone.
You would not need a bill to run through Congress to get “Seasonal Depression” put on the list of reasons to deny you via the NICS system; a gun bigot Attorney General or FBI Director would do the trick, according to what I saw of the language in the bills previously mentioned.
So now we have Tony Scheffler being forced by a private institution to seek mental health treatment before he can finish his law degree. If he is to attempt to try and finish it somewhere else, he is going to have to not only pay for his current year over again to get credit for class hours, he is going to have to explain why he could not finish at Hamline. If he says something less than the truth, the school he is transferring to needs only ask Hamline for his status there to find out that someone at Hamline believes him to be insane and that his discontinuation at Hamline stems from his refusal to seek treatment.
But if he takes the easy route and goes to “Treatment” for his alleged “Condition”, he may then be, in the future, denied his Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
Between a rock and a hard place, indeed.Â
While I thoroughly believe that people of less than stable mental states should not be allowed firearms, they should likewise be denied the ability to get their hands on knvies, bats, matches and gasoline, and automobiles. Essentially, they should be locked up where they cannot hurt themselves or anyone else and not released until they can be trusted. But America is not willing to do this. They would rather medicate and release. Which always leads to a problem, which leads to recapture, reinstatement into an institution, and then remedication and release. Over and over and over again.
We don’t even lock up people of sound mental states who refuse to follow society’s rules, so why should I expect my government to lock up those who don’t have the mental stability to know they are breaking the rules?
Everyone of you out there has probably gotten into a discussion with a person who does not believe in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Most likely, if you broached the topic of private citizen concealed carry, the gun bigot said something along the lines of “You’re just being paranoid. There is no reason for you to carry a gun outside of your house for protection. That is what the police are for.” I have been called “crazy”, “insane”, “out of my mind” and a plethora of other names by gun bigots I’ve had discussions with on the topic of private citizen concealed carry. Nearly every single one. It seems that the default reaction to the thought of people carrying firearms for their own protection isn’t that they’re stupid, gun-toting hillbillys, it is that they do not live in reality. They have to be crazy to think they need to pack artillery. They have to be paranoid.
Paranoia is a certified mental health condition. Extreme paranoia is cause for a white coat with wrap-around arms.
What if your boss saw your name printed in the paper in a list of people who have concealed carry licenses? He/she just so happnes to be a gun bigot who considers people who feel the need to carry a firearm outside their home to be paranoid. There is nothing stopping them from conducting a search of your work area and vehicle once it enters the property.
Or demanding that you seek professional mental help in order to keep your job. Really, who are you going to appeal their decision to? If your employer has a Personnel or HR department, do you think that they’re going to listen to you or your boss? Will your county or state employer regulatory department stand by you on this?
Yes, there are a lot of “If’s” in these scenarios, but truth is stranger than fiction. And how many of you thought that one of the things you read today would include a guy who got “mentally evaluated” by a college Dean out of his law degree?
Hell, just last week, Say Uncle got defined as a “terrorist” by the state of Alabama for his political beliefs. While that does give folks like him (and myself, it seems) certain bragging rights, I’m not going to sit around and wait for it to become official.
Don’t give the gun bigots the ammo to cut you off from your rights. Unless the legislation includes specific, unchangable without an act of Congress definitions of what is included on the list of reasons for denial, any legislation on the inclusion of mental health records from the states into the NICS database gets a thumbs down.
The NRA won’t fight for this. You are going to have to. The GOA, the JPFO and the CCRKBA will. I will do my best to post updates here on this issue, but I cannot be everywhere.
