By Jim Shepherd
After the Senate voted 57-43 yesterday to strike down a Social Security regulation that would have required the Social Security Administration to report anyone who received disability benefits and had a wide range of medical conditions – from serious mental issues to sleeping and eating disorders- mainstream headlines quickly read “Senate Restores Right of Mentally Ill to Purchase Guns”.
It’s a certain sign of just how far the chasm is between fact and objectivity when it comes to supposedly “unbiased” news reports. The measure wasn’t a great piece of legislation artfully crafted to address a glaring need in the existing system. It was a slap-dash piece of legislation. In fact, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, said it was filled with “vague characteristics that do not fit into the federal mentally defective standard” . Those same “vague characteristics” would have lumped people with sleeping disorders into a group of considerably more serious mental issues that would have required the Social Security Administration to notify the FBI of those conditions- so they could be entered into the FBI’s NICS background check system.
In short, it would have guaranteed those people would be denied if they tried to purchase a gun if their conditions led them to have third-party involvement in the management of their affairs.
As Grassley said “If a specific individual is likely to be violent due to the nature of their mental illness, then the government should have to prove it.”
I know it’s not popular with anti-gun folks, but the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is woven pretty tightly into our national fabric. Read more