Gord
Member
"No sense in fighting it, now - it's for your own good, chaps."
One thing i've heard about this bill is that it'll call for dumping medical records into NICS?
MYTH: A child who has been diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder "can be banned for life from ever owning a gun as an adult." "Your ailing grandfather could have his entire gun collection seized, based only on a diagnosis of Alzheimer's (and there goes the family inheritance)."
FACT: Again, a psychiatric or medical diagnosis alone is not an "adjudication" or "commitment."
Critics base their concern on BATFE regulations that define an "adjudication" to include a decision by a "court, board, commission, or other lawful authority." They claim any doctor could potentially be a "lawful authority."
They are wrong. Not even the Clinton Administration took such an extreme position. In fact, the term "lawful authority" was apparently intended to cover various types of government panels that are similar to "courts, boards, or commissions." Basic principles of legal interpretation require reading it that way. The term also doesn't override the basic constitutional protections that come into play in decisions about a person's mental health.
Finally, records of voluntary treatment also would not be available under federal and state health privacy laws, which H.R. 2640 also does not override.
If the regulations are illegal (as well as unlawful and non-statutory according to GOA), then it should be an easy enough matter to challenge them in court. These regulations were put into place almost a decade ago and nobody seems to have done that. Why is that?
As others have already noted, 18 U.S.C. 925(c) is a federal provision and has been stripped of funds by Congress for many years now. However, the new provision moves the process for relief from disability to the state level where it cannot be so easily defunded by Congress. So the comparison isn't a direct analog.
The letter from the GOA seems pretty spot on to me. I'm not going to bash the NRA but I have a feeling they are making a big mistake here. No I have not read the bill. I don't need to read it. All I need to read are the names of those responsible for writing it. McCarthy/Leahy/Schumer.
Let’s see, NFA, GCA, FOPA machine gun ban, Federal assault weapons ban, NICS, DC gun bans, California gun bans, bans of all sorts. Very little if any of this crap has ever been challenged in court, why?
We have a provision to get gun rights back but the problem is it's been defunded. Who do you think is responsible for "defunding" the system? In other words we have a mechanism that is supposed to allow citizens to get their gun rights back but the government doesn’t abide by it. At the same time we are to believe that they won't find a way to nullify the new system. Right!
If Carolyn McCarthy supports it, it's bad for America and freedom, that's all you need to know.
FACT: Again, a psychiatric or medical diagnosis alone is not an "adjudication" or "commitment."
Critics base their concern on BATFE regulations that define an "adjudication" to include a decision by a "court, board, commission, or other lawful authority." They claim any doctor could potentially be a "lawful authority."
They are wrong. Not even the Clinton Administration took such an extreme position. In fact, the term "lawful authority" was apparently intended to cover various types of government panels that are similar to "courts, boards, or commissions." Basic principles of legal interpretation require reading it that way. The term also doesn't override the basic constitutional protections that come into play in decisions about a person's mental health.
Basic principles of legal interpretation require reading it that way. The term also doesn't override the basic constitutional protections that come into play in decisions about a person's mental health.
Dr. Dickie said:Gee, and I thought that, "..shall not be infringed," was pretty damn clear. I was wrong about that and I think the NRA is wrong about this.
Skirmisher said:If the NICS Improvement Bill is so simply stated defining who will be prohibited from owning guns, why does the U.S. Senate think it necessary to add 50 pages of amendments to the original Bill