Many folks are scared of “mentally unstable folks” with guns. Me too.
However, being scared doesn’t mean that we get to take the rights away from people we’re uncomfortable around – or whose demographic group might be found to be statistically more “dangerous” than another.
“Mental illness” is itself an unstable concept — Asperger’s Syndrome has been listed as a separate disorder in the e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but it looks like it will be collapsed into the spectrum of autism-related disorders in the DSM-5. Indeed, the more you learn about the history of the DSM, the less it looks like a scientific document and more the product of a congress, with “diseases” voted in and out because of ideological pressure and fashion and whim. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think, but the actual process was no more scientific than changing the recipe for hot dogs, the manufacture of which we are warned not to inquire about.
Ask David Lewis, a 35-year-old gentleman from Amherst, New York. His guns were confiscated by the state. Why? He was once prescribed an anti-anxiety medicine, and that flagged him as unstable under New York’s new gun law.
A judge just ruled that the state has to give him his guns back.
Talk about slippery slopes. Were it not for one commonsense judge, New Yorkers who’ve experienced some social anxiety would have been lumped in with utter crazies, and had their rights simply stripped.
Indeed, they already have. Lewis is almost certainly not the only perfectly sensible citizen to have had his guns grabbed.
Thus it begins.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.