Here’s a .pdf of the twenty-three executive orders and actions that the president initiated just after noon today. The second item allows mental health professionals to report patients who they think are a risk to the community. I worry about that. It’s one of the main ways we might have avoided the massacres in Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown, but it also will create a powerful incentive for people steeped in our gun culture to avoid seeking routine psychiatric or psychological care. It’s kind of a Catch-22, frankly. You might catch someone who is mentally ill before they can kill a bunch of people. But you also might create a situation where a LOT of mentally ill people go without treatment.
I am not clever enough to know how to get around this conundrum, but I fear that the net effect of that particular executive order will be negative.
Use this thread to discuss the president’s speech and his proposals.
Update [2013-1-16 13:16:39 by BooMan]: Here is the full set of proposals (.pdf).
It is indeed one of the trickiest proposals. At the same time, mental health professionals are currently required by law to report people who they feel are a direct threat to others. Just like they are required to report possibly abusive parents or children of the elderly.
One wonders how many of the people who would fall into this category would be getting any treatment voluntarily even if this particular requirement was not in effect.
Yeah, I don’t know quite what the HIPAA hiccup was and exactly how it was addressed.
My suspicion about the HIPAA hiccup is that it involves (1) informing medical professionals clearly what HIPAA requires because a lot of them are conservatively covering legal due diligence against liability, and (2) exploring the creating of a HIPAA-compliant standard data transaction for electronically communicating risk information to law enforcement.
It’s bad in the short term, but in the long term it will result in gun owners being stigmatized as “crazy”, which could finally put an end to gun culture.
why would stigmatizing ordinary gun owners be desirable?
Because it will make ordinary people less likely to want guns. Short-term, that means fewer gun death due to fewer being armed. Long-term, it will move the demographics against gun culture and allow substantive gun control measures.
Because gun-nuttery should be stigmatized? The NRA has capitalized for decades on the Rambo/cowboy image to sell guns for their corporate sponsors. It’s long past time for a turnaround. We have no problem stigmatizing fat people, smokers, “losers”, poor people, etc., but somehow the culture has elevated (with huge marketing help) an organization passionately devoted to unrestrained freedom to buy and use machines whose sole purpose is to destroy, hurt, and kill. I’m against the psych proposal for other reasons, but moving the culture is important.
The NRA would say that it’s the people who don’t like to shoot animals for sport that are crazy.
On the face of his speech just now he came across as the voice of reason and the spirit of compassion. He used the wisdom of children to call for moral guidance.
The utter overreaching freakout of the NRA and those Rep that support it still is playing right into your point that these issues are sorely dividing the platform of the GOP from middle America and just as surely dividing the whole Party.
To go after sensible gun laws when the polls show extraordinary support across the country, to calmly stand unflinching while the NRA goes batshit crazy shall fracture any toehold Rep’s had on the Hastert rule and any credibility going forward.
By the time the Obama campaign team rolls out their support structure online the Forward button of alot of American computers is going to be hit and there will be no cover for a backtracking Boehner.
The gunsucks are objecting to his use of children. I thought it was nicely done. Basically, the gunsucks cannot get a bunch of kids holding guns. They are gonna lose that battle.
Bleak irony that “using kids” in a speech is so deplored by an organization devoted to maintaining the “freedom” to use kids as targets.
The mental health issue is tricky because there are some civil liberties concerns involved that should be hashed out. And not everyone with a mental health condition is dangerous.
A second issue is the definition of “military-style assault weapon”. For most people it goes beyond being a matter of being a semi-automatic weapon that is potentially modifiable to be an automatic weapon. And there is an issue with the number of these weapons already on the street and about to boom in sales in anticipation of legislation.
Also, the White House needs to explain to the public exactly what they mean by “school resource person” because the public is going to jump to the conclusion that that means “armed guard”.
I’ve got a paranoid psychotic family member. No way, no how, not ever, do I want him to have access to gun again.
It’s in the best interests of himself, his wife, and our society that he’s not allowed anywhere near a firearm, and anything that can be done to help ensure that doesn’t happen should be done.
The president put in just the right way today: Just as people have second ammendment rights, we have rights, too. And no one as crazy as a shithouse rat should be allowed access to firearms thru loopholes or any other nonsense.
yup, pretty much.
I would think that most mentally ill people who exhibit violent tendencies are not “gun nuts” who would avoid help fearing their guns would be taken away. Many of the recent mass shooters have been people well into their mental illness and receiving/received professional help when they get to the point where they start buying the guns and huge ammo stockpiles.
I grew up lower socio-economic, southern, rural white. Also known as TrailerTrash (except we didn’t have trailers back then) and so I know quite a few people who are seriously “into” the gun culture and are also (due to life, drink and drugs) certifiable. There is no way in Hell these people are EVER going to report themselves.
This bullshit of worrying about crazy gun nuts not getting help is just that: bullshit. If they are going to try to get help, gun laws are not going to make a difference.
But Medicare for All with mental health coverage might.
Agreed. Those who are desperate enough to seek help are not going to be stopped by gun laws, and those who are more concerned about their guns than their health were not going to get help in the first place.
I have to disagree with that entirely.
The issue isn’t “crazy gun nuts” not getting help, it’s basically normal people who own guns, aka almost all the people I know, and who already have a huge reluctance to seek mental health care, not getting help.
The attitude where I live really is, “man up and get over it.” I’ve heard that basic idea expressed my whole life. If you attach the loss of your right to buy guns to that, it can’t do anything but make an already bad situation much worse.
A good friend of mine was a HUGE duck hunter – this was a big part of his identity. He committed suicide by shotgun, but did seek out help for depression at the end, it was just too late. If you’d told him getting help meant the end of hunting, no way no how he even considers going for help.
I’m fairly certain that the idea isn’t to take guns away from anyone who visits a mental health specialist. That would include a massive number of harmless people. Unless your friends are homicidal, they don’t have anything to worry about. We just have to make sure they know that.
there’s an entire industry and political party who will make sure that they don’t know that.
These policy shifts will make a small dent. Mostly just window dressing, though.
Well, all I can say is that some people think I’m crazy, but I’m not.
I think they are crazy and maybe dangerous, but who am I to say?
So much for doctor/patient privilege – this is totally buying into the NRA meme – it’s only the crazy ones!
I’m disappointed that the PTB ignored the “well-regulated” aspect of the second amendment in favor of the “individual rights.”
Forget about a peaceful life, we have weapons to sell! That’s the American Way.
Back in the 80’s,I had a co-worker in Florida who sold guns in newspaper classified ads. Her response to my shocked reaction was “Don’t worry, we don’t sell to black people.”
Hmm. Today I heard my president point out during this very important speech that those who are mentally ill are much more likely to be the VICTIMS of violence, than they are to be the perpetrators of violence.
More importantly, I’m not sure that the regulations were being changed, as much as they were being clarified so people know that when there is the threat of violence, they are required to report. They always have been.
First of all, all the President is calling for is clarification of laws already on the books. Secondly, this would only be totally buying into the NRA crap if that was all he called for.
All this “mental health” stuff is just playing into the NRA bullshit about the problem being all those not-“law abiding Americans”, not guns. The notion of “pre-detecting” crime through bogus psych profiles has gone way too far already, without liberals buying into it. It’s just more pol pretense of “taking action” by doing something harmful, popular (we’re always happy to violate the rights of those with problems), and useless.
As far as I can find, none of the major gun massacres in recent history would have been prevented by this kind of screening. This feel-good legislation will simply damage client/provider confidentiality, with very real impact on the effectiveness of psychological treatment. There are already laws requiring therapists to report cases where they see imminent threats of harm to the patient or others. Is their police power now to expand to reporting every personality disorder — depression, obsession, addictive behavior, religious visions, meanness — as belonging on a list? On this one point I have to agree with the NRA: this is the road to the police state, and it has nothing to do with guns.
The idea is just a sop to the gun industry and its NRA propaganda arm. Guns are the problem, not certain predetermined kinds of people. In my book, in fact, the most positive diagnostic parameter for crazy people is membership in the NRA.
Judging enforcing restraining orders would be more helpful than medical reporting. Except in certain extreme cases.
What really would help the most is a lobbying law that taxed corporations stiffly for donations to groups like the NRA. Make them front their own panic sales campaigns.
The president loses me on this effort.
This is a perfect example of what policy scholars call “symbolic” policy making. Lacking sufficient resources and constitutional authority to actually implement the only thing that can significantly reduce gun violence to something like European levels — removing millions a firearms from individual ownership in the US — the president instead orders and proposes a number of things that make it look like government is trying something, and can actually make life problematic for a lots of ancillary people, but cannot really have a significant effect on levels of gun violence. It’s the worst kind of policy-making and usually causes more problems than it solves.
Is there any chance that the Newport massacre has changed public opinion sufficiently nationwide to allow something like an assault weapons ban to pass, let alone be successfully implemented, after having failed to curtail gun violence in any measurable way the last time we tried that? No. Not only does the GOP control of the House let alone the large number of gun-friendly Democrats, prevent it from happening, but public opinion according to Pew research is more supportive than ever of defending gun rights and less supportive of restricting them.
Number 1: Old study prior to the most recent atrocity. Polls since thn show major majority support for everything the President proposed.
Number 2: You appear to be arguing that if something doesn’t have a chance of passing it shouldn’t even be proposed. That sounds rather counterproductive.
No, Pew was on NPR just yesterday, reaffirming their numbers. They find lower support for gun control now than at any time since they’ve been tracking the issue.
And on passing legislation, I don’t mind if what’s proposed makes any sense. But the assault weapons ban was tried before and failed to do anything except 1) help put Newt Gingrich in the Speaker’s chair; 2) popularize military style weapons, which had never been a profitable production items for gun makers before, and 3) cause Waco Texas, which in turn caused Oklahoma City.
Gun violence is lower now than at any time since the early 1960’s. Something is working and that is what I hoped would be identified and proposed for legislation instead of bad legislation that can only be successful symbolically.
If I remember the details correctly, it could also have prevented the Virginia Tech shooting.