Short: Guns and mental health

Finally, someone else is talking about tighter restrictions on gun purchases for those with mental health problems. Senators Toomey and Manchin, both strong proponents for gun rights, have a very center-right proposal that tries to improve the situation without infringing on gun ownership rights. How to do that?Strengthen the parts of the law that forbid sales to the wrong people.

That sounds eminently logical to me. In my opinion, this is likely to be more effective than more guns in schools and hoping someone carrying will be on site to stop a shooter. It definitely should be more palatable than an assault weapons ban.

But I'm wrong, it's not palatable. RedState is immediately against it. My God, they're empowering doctors to take away your gun rights. What if some pinko doctor decides you shouldn't have a gun. Even worse, what if lots of pinko doctors got to together and put hordes of red-blooded Americans on the list simply because they think anyone who wants a gun is unbalanced.

I agree that there is potential for abuse. Therefore doctors should be answerable when they refer a person for the restriction. But I thought we wanted to try to prevent disturbed people from buying guns. Do we still want to do this? Well, this is what it would look like.

Maybe, on second thought, Erick Erickson is fine with Jared Loughner and James Holmes buying guns. I'm still not.

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