Gun control from the mentally ill isn’t the easy answer some suggest

There’s widespread agreement that the mentally ill shouldn’t have firearms. There’s much less agreement on how to define “mentally ill.”

It’s a discussion that’s come up nationally — once again — after last month’s shooting at a Florida high school. Bills seeking to prevent the mentally ill from possessing firearms have been proposed in states such as New York, Utah and Arizona. Expect the issue to come up in Nevada’s next legislative session as well.

Even President Donald Trump chimed in, saying recently, “I don’t want mentally ill people to be having guns.”

But who is mentally ill? The harder challenge might be finding someone who’s not.

In 2017, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 8.3 million adults are experiencing serious psychological distress. The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that in a given year, 20 percent of Americans experience a mental illness. That’s more than 43 million people. Next year, millions of new people will join that list as others get better and move off the list. More than 13 percent of boys receive an ADHD diagnosis.

Keeping everyone who has had a mental illness or disorder from owning a gun could end up eviscerating the constitutional rights of many people who are not a danger to anybody.

You saw this tension in last year’s rollback of an Obama administration regulation on gun purchases. That rule, which never took effect, would have prevented people collecting Social Security disability who also had a mental disorder from passing a federal background check. It sounds reasonable, until you realize that those conditions include people with eating disorders or who can’t handle their own finances. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which is open to gun control laws, opposed Obama’s regulation.

“To the contrary, studies show that people with mental disabilities are less likely to commit firearm crimes than to be the victims of violence by others,” wrote the ACLU. Twenty-three national disability groups opposed the rule.

There are similar objections to preventing people on the no-fly list from buying a firearm. It sounds appealing on the surface, but there are individuals on the no-fly list who have never been charged with or convicted of a crime. You shouldn’t lose your due process rights and your right to own a gun simply because an unknown, unaccountable bureaucrat puts your name on a list.

It’s worth remembering too that it’s already illegal under federal law to sell a firearm to someone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective.”

Saying you want to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill sounds nice. But the reality is much more complicated and will no doubt raise a host of inconvenient and troubling issues.