Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Since Aurora and Sandy Hook there has been a lot of talk about mental health care in this country as well as a demand for "expanded background checks" for buying guns. The NICS system currently in place reviews a person's mental health records and their criminal records. The criminal record is pretty cut and dried. Any felony conviction bars you from owning a gun. I guess that could be further expanded to include violent misdemeanors like assault, but I don't think some young punk making a bad choice and getting in a fight is reason enough to bar them from ever owning a gun.

The mental health is where things get complicated. If you have been committed to a mental institution that shows up on the NICS, but a simple diagnosis isn't shown. Without a record of violence or commitments a person stays pretty well out of the system. If a simple diagnosis shows up on the NICS system I foresee two big problems.

1. If being diagnosed with something is enough to bar you from owning firearms that makes it easy for the government to disarm the people. I know that sounds pretty crazy, but in the 80's and 90's thousands of children were diagnosed with ADD or ADHD whether or not anything was really wrong with them. It was a way for the pharmaceutical companies to make a pile of cash off pills from the children's parents. It's really easy for a doctor to say something is wrong with you even if there isn't. We've all heard of the crooked mechanic. You bring the car in for an oil change, but they tell you the transmission is going out and has to be rebuilt or some such crap. A doctor can do the same thing. I'm not saying it WILL happen. I am saying it might happen.

2. This just makes mental health even MORE taboo. Remember what I said about ADD/ADHD? Rather than doing anything to really try and help the children most parents just bought the Ritalin and any other pills the doctor would throw at them. Rather than looking at their children to see if they think there is a problem they just blindly gave kids the drugs. Mental illness is already looked down upon. Rather than actually looking for a way to help the mentally ill these expanded background checks are just a way to make their lives worse. I get the idea of wanting to save the children and whatever, but think about this from the point of view of a mental illness patient. Right now if you have problems if people find out about it you are seen as diseased and shunned. Does that make you want to see a doctor about your problems? Now picture these background checks targeting mental health patients. Say you are a gun owner. You have some sort of problem, but you know yourself well enough to know you won't hurt anyone, but if you see a doctor and get diagnosed with something there's a chance your guns will be taken away and you will not be allowed to own them. Do you still feel as eager to see a doctor? Not everyone will. Out of fear of what a diagnosis means mental healthcare will be that much more avoided.