I don't know about others, but if I knew someone that had voices in their head telling them to kill everyone around them, I would not be the one to hand them a gun. Just sayin'.
For sure, definitely not. In fact, when my brother started showing symptoms, my father and I made the decision early on to stuff every dang gun in the house into my safe until we figured out what the heck was going on
. We kept them all there until he was out of the house, even after he was diagnosed and medicated, completely back to normal.
Try fitting 30+ long guns and 50+ pistols into a 25 gun safe, lol...Lets just say I don't have many guns without at least minor safe dings anymore.
Kind of sad, we used to go shooting together pretty regularly. My brother was never a huge firearms fan like I am, but now he has no interest in them, which I can respect.
But anyways, many assume
1. That every person with a serious mental illness experiencing hallucinations or "reality breaks" are subject to violent influences from their hallucinations. They are not.
2. That every person with a serious mental illness is powerless to ignore those voices or hallucinations, or to separate them from reality. They are not. Hearing voices and hallucinations as a mentally ill person does not necessarily mean you don't know they are voices and hallucinations and are unable to acknowledge them as unreal and ignore them to the greater extent.
However, if the person is hearing voices because they do not have access to affordable medication that they are willing to take and could enable them to live a completely normal life devoid of voices, shouldn't the emphasis be on making such medications available instead of restricting their rights? Particularly when there are plenty of options available to a person willing to commit heinous crimes apart from firearms?
Exactly how many seriously deranged people who hear voices from a "higher power" telling them to kill are going to give up their crusade "commanded from god" for lack of a legally acquired gun?
None, or close to it.
That mindset doesn't even work on "sane" criminals, who are arguably much less motivated.
If you are deranged and you believe with all your soul that god wants you to kill people and is going to torture your brain until you do, you are probably going to do it one way or the other.
Restricting the rights of a very large (millions) group of people because of the POTENTIAL actions of a small minority...That doesn't sound right.