People need to pass psych screening to become cops or enter the military (not that it's perfect).
It should be mandatory before purchasing a gun too.
I don't remember being psych screened at all when I entered the military; it couldn't have been that thorough.
All sane people certainly favor keeping guns away from insane people. The devil's in the details though.
What threshold for mental illness do you propose to preclude gun ownership? Depression? A cluster B personality disorder? Psychosis?
Will a prohibition be permanent, or temporary until a person is treated or stable on medication? If the latter, is someone going to check up on the person to ensure they keep taking their medication? Or will we just trust the crazy people to keep taking their antipsychotic meds?
Will re-screening be required periodically? If not, is there a point in doing it at all? If so, how often, at whose expense?
A paper questionnaire or an interview, or both? If an interview, will it be done by a board certified psychiatrist, or (for example) the desk-riding laughably-unqualified cop who interviewed my wife during her CCW application process?
How standardized will the process be? If it's not standardized, is that fair? If it is standardized, do you really think people won't figure out how to game the system? Crazy people are crazy, not necessarily stupid.
It's easy to propose these things in an abstract sense. Actually making them work in practice is another issue.
Like most well-meaning gun control laws, I suspect the end result whatever you do in this area will be inconvenience and headaches for sane law-abiding citizens, a near-total failure in keeping guns away from most mentally ill people, and an absolute failure in dissuading the criminal crazies.
Again, consider the possibility that what we all want (an efficient, effective system to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill) simply may not be possible.
Case in point: Major Nidal Hasan. Medical school classmate of mine - a year behind me. Went through the same psych screening I did upon entering the military (which again I don't think actually happened). Had many encounters with psychiatrists,
actually became a fellowship trained subspecialist psychiatrist himself ...
Shot a bunch of people in a "gun free zone" ...
So, if you want to tighten up the mental illness screening (a laudable goal) let's have some specifics with regard to how you're going to do it.
Difficulty: No magical or wishful thinking.
For some rough unscientific 30-seconds-with-Google produced numbers for perspective:
10,288 people died last year in drunk driving crashes (first link on Google
source)
8,755 firearm murders last year (first link on Google
source)
While we're aiming for rainbows, why aren't we screening people for alcoholism and revoking their drivers licenses? Driving's not even a Constitutionally protected right.
