Liberal Forum

Misty » 15 Feb 2018 3:38 pm » wrote:Maybe because it's true.

On February 28, 2017, SCROTUS signed a measure nixing a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of some severely mentally ill people.

It was in all the papers.
I guess you missed it.
They probably didn't cover it on Gateway Pundit or Pajamas Media, your two favorite wingnut sites.

No, the GOP Did Not Just Repeal the Background Check System or Give Guns to the Mentally
by CHARLES C. W. COOKE
...when you saw these headlines you probably thought, “Wow, that seems extreme.” Has the House of Representatives really got rid of background checks? Are Republicans really intent upon putting firearms in the hands of the “severely mentally ill”? What fresh insanity is this!

And, given the way the headlines are written, you could be forgiven for drawing any one of those conclusions. But here’s the thing: None of them is true. Not at all. This was yet another sordid episode of The Press Is Having a Breakdown, coupled with a special installment of Celebrities Tweet Falsehoods Without Knowing It. Contrary to the AP’s suggestion, the background check system remains in place. Contrary to The Hill’s implication, the rule change in question did not repeal the limitations on the “severely mentally ill.” None of that happened....

Here’s the American Association of People with Disabilities explaining what was at stake:

This rule would require the Social Security Administration to forward the names of all Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit recipients who use a representative payee to help manage their benefits due to a mental impairment to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).


Or, in layman’s terms: The rule would have allowed bureaucrats within one of our federal agencies to bar American citizens from exercising a constitutional right — and on the highly questionable grounds that to be incapable of managing one’s finances is, by definition, to be a “mental defective.”

There were a host of reasons to object to this measure. On separation-of-powers grounds, the prospect of the Social Security Administration playing judge, jury, and executioner is flatly intolerable. On due process grounds, there was nothing to recommend the measure (as the ACLU made abundantly clear in its opposition letter). On statutory grounds, it seems clear that the SSA was acting ultra vires....

one does not have to agree with me on process or in outlook to see that as a matter of positive policy, the idea was a terrible one. As Yale’s Dr. Mark Rosen observed when the rule was first adumbrated, ​the link between financial acumen and mental illness is extraordinarily weak:

“Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe,” said Dr. Marc Rosen, a Yale psychiatrist who has studied how veterans with mental health problems manage their money. “They are very different determinations.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/44 ... entally-il