The pertinent part of that bill is about listing mental health information in the background check system. It doesn't increase the number of transactions where a background check would be required.
The NRA regularly opposes such expansions (for instance they oppose closing the so called gun show loophole).
The idea that mental health information should be a part of background checks is a pretty tough row to hoe. With crimes at least there's an ostensibly fair trial that determines the guilt or innocence of the person; with mental health there may or may not be any kind of trial but the resulting embargo on your gun rights will be just as real.
Further that would incentivize people who might be struggling with mental illness NOT to seek help, lest they forever find themselves unable to own a gun. Is that what we want? Discouraging people from seeking help?
Finally, there's absolutely NO incentive for the people actually executing the background check system to "be reasonable" such that if you had a nervous breakdown in college at 20 years old from trying to take 21 credits so you could graduate before your scholarship ran out (as a totally contrived example) should that really prevent 40 year old you from owning a shotgun to shoot clays? I might argue "no" but the bureaucracy has NO incentive to allow it and EVERY incentive not to allow it. There are no real repercussions for taking someone's rights in a nebulous and opaque manner but large repercussions if anyone, anywhere ever who has any kind of mental health history ever gets a gun and uses it murderously.
The idea that mental health information should be a part of background checks is a pretty tough row to hoe.
So tough that many states still absolutely refuse to supply their relevant mental health records to the NICS "instant" background check system. And then there's the screwups, the Virginia Tech shooter should have been stopped by the gun store (and who knows what would have happened after that), but Virginia hasn't forwarded his involuntary treatment order to the NICS due to their confusion and/or sloth.
Or take the Colorado theater shooter, he so alarmed his university psychiatrist that she reported him to its threat board, which she was also a member of. But he soon withdrew, and they washed their hands of any further responsibility WRT to him.
I'm sure it's a "hard-line" stance to take, but if you want to make gun violence a public health issue I'd be far, far more supportive of the idea that we have a mental health problem here in the US than an access-to-guns problem here in the US.
Indeed. My mother's RN residency was just before the original anti-psychotics came into widespread use, and she did 3 months in a psych ward. After she was finished and then working in the same hospital, she was amazed to see a "hopeless" (for thousand of years) case working in a custodial or the like function at that hospital.
Where I suspect he got some extra help to keep on that nasty class of drugs and otherwise manage his life. Little did she suspect they, and lithium for bi-polar disorder, would be used as an excuse to dump the mentally ill on the streets, saving money that could be better used in other ways to buy votes.
I don't think so. They've opposed any background check legislation proposed before, and that bill seems more like it is about "augmenting" "background checks" rather than actually augmenting background checks in a useful manner.
