Sixth Circuit: Mental Health Gun Ban Is Unconstitutional

[Malsua 1,422]

This is going to really upset anti-gun nuts.   Their idea is that if you're ever the slightest bit crazy, you're denied guns forever.   Ask any number of veterans who've had their rights revoked or the other group of veterans who refuse to get help so their rights won't be revoked.

 

The sixth circuit doesn't apply to NJ, but one could see the 3rd circuit going the other way thus pushing SCOTUS to rule on it.  Of course they're avoiding gun cases, so it probably won't get to SCOTUS any time soon.

 

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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/12/19/sixth-circuit-mental-health-gun-ban-is-unconstitutional/

 

On December 18, a three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a ban on gun purchases for anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to a mental institution” violated the Second Amendment rights of a Michigan man who was denied a gun purchase because of a mental institution commitment in 1986.

 

According to The Wall Street Journal, 73-year-old Clifford Charles Taylor “recently attempted to buy a gun but was denied on the grounds that he had been committed by a court to a mental institution in 1986 after emotional problems associated with a divorce.”

 

Judge Danny Boggs wrote the majority opinion for the panel: “The government’s interest in keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill is not sufficiently related to depriving the mentally healthy, who had a distant episode of commitment, of their constitutional rights.”

 

On October 17, 2013, Breitbart News reported that Mayo Clinic psychiatrist, J. Michael Bostwick, M.D., warned that the push to take Second Amendment rights away from the mentally ill was misplaced. He said, “The majority of mentally ill people aren’t dangerous” and that the attempt to bar every person who has ever had a mental health diagnosis from gun ownership would do nothing to reduce high profile, gun-related crimes.

 

He stressed that “as long as  the Second Amendment is the law of the land, the right of the people to keep and bear arms … will be an integral part of the American scene.”

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected].

[Old Glock guy 1,127]

Wow, there's still logic and reason in Free America!  Unlike here in PRNJ, where the courts say, "What Second Amendment?"

[Vlad G 345]

Actually it seems to me his argument wasn't so much that crazy people can't have guns, but that there needs to be a way to undo the "crazy status" once it is triggered. 

 

 

However, federal law also says that people must have opportunities to prove that their disqualifying “disabilities” have ended and that they should be able to own a gun.

The federal government defunded its “relief from disabilities” program in 1992, said the opinion. Since 2008, states have been able to get federal grants to set up their own programs. But such programs are voluntary on the part of the states, and Michigan has yet to set one up, leaving Mr. Tyler without a venue by which to prove that his “disability” no longer should apply.

 

I'll bet if that wasn't the case this wouldn't have resulted in the same decision. 

[High Exposure 5,661]

http://njgunforums.com/forum/index.php/topic/74052-us-appeals-court-deems-gun-law-unconstitutional/#entry935534