by John Watts
Vice President Joe Biden is planning to continue his efforts at expanding background checks after the Manchin-Toomey gun control bill recently failed in the Senate. According to Politico, the Vice President has yet to let his boss know about his plans.
The gun control advocates are not retreating from the push to impinge on law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights – they have just temporarily switched tactics. Having been momentarily thwarted at the federal level, they are now intensely focusing their efforts at the state level.
Recent news reports show that senators have been catching flak at home from constituents ginned up by the gun control advocates’ purposeful emotional manipulation.
Sen. Ayotte (R-NH) was even confronted by one of the Sandy Hook victim’s children in a town hall event for her admirable ‘no’ vote against expanded background checks.
Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden’s ambitious son, Beau, currently Delaware Attorney General, has been angling for look-good easy publicity by pushing gun control legislation.
According to Delaware Online:
"The Biden-backed legislation would require mental health providers to call police if they suspect a patient presents a danger to himself or others. Police would be required to investigate and make a report to the state Department of Justice in determining whether the person should be banned from possessing a firearm.
Prosecutors could ask a judge to ban the mentally ill individual from owning weapons and seize guns that person already owns. If the mentally ill person is a juvenile living with parents, anyone in the household could be forced to turn over guns.
Mental health professionals who fail to follow the regulations could face civil liability and have their licenses revoked. Physicians, nurses and social workers, including those working in schools, would fall under Biden’s bill."
Some supporters maintain that this process provides “due process,” but they are mistaken. It punishes someone who has not yet committed a crime and possibly may not even have explicitly made any threats. It is based on a professional’s subjective opinion – it expects them to read another person’s thoughts and predict another’s behavior.
Worse yet, with provisions punishing “mental health” professionals for failing to report potentially dangerous people, it puts an incentive on them to over-report, so anyone who blurts out “I was so mad I could have killed..” will find themselves the target of this law.
There are additional concerns beyond misplaced liability suits. The violation of an innocent person’s privacy is chief among them. With passage of New York's SAFE Act, mental health professionals are pointing out that it is impossible for a person to speculate on how dangerous an individual could be without having met them face-to-face.
In fact, honest psychiatrists will be the first to tell you that a diagnosis of a “mental disorder” has no predictive ability for determining who could potentially be violent.
To go a step further, one might legitimately question the scientific grounds that the entire psychiatric field is based on – especially in light of the fact that the definitions and criteria of what is considered a “mental disorder” is constantly shifting and expanding.
Did anybody ever determine that the Marathon Bombers were mentally ill? Can “Islamic jihad” now be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (ed. V)?
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PDFTags: gun control, second amendment, guns, background checks, Vice President Joe Biden, Beau Biden, Joe Biden, Machin-Toomey