Gun Control Debate Clouds Definition of Mentally Ill

[HereSince1628]

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/03/-gun-control-debate-clouds-definition-of-mentally-ill

The consequences for trying to link a diagnosis to violent behavior became clear after it was revealed that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was possibly autistic. The autism community came out in full force to debunk any report that tried to draw such a link. And recent research shows the risk of violent acts committed by those with mental health diagnoses as part of the total population was just 3-5 percent.

Yet the same question of gun access for the mentally ill will be posed to members of the Senate when they come back from recess Monday and consider legislation that asks for tougher gun background checks for those deemed mentally incompetent.

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Current federal law says any person who has been formally committed to a mental institution, such as by court order, or who has been adjudicated as a so-called "mental defective," cannot get access to a gun.

Those standards aren't condoned by mental health professionals, who say the term "mental defective" is deeply offensive, as well as not clearly defined. Gun control groups, meanwhile, say the law doesn't do nearly enough to keep guns away from people who shouldn't have them. And even gun rights groups have problems with the current system, with the NRA saying recently that states needed to do a better job at submitting names of the mentally ill to the National Instant Criminal Background System (NICS). The NRA is right that states haven't been great at compliance – almost 20 states submitted fewer than 100 mental health records to the database as of October 2012, according to research from the gun control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns.


So while there are problems with the current system, most groups involved in the debate disagree about how to fix them. And nowhere is that fight playing out more vigorously than at the state level.

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