No, Trump-Era ATF Isn’t Letting Crazy People Own Guns

One of the groups of people prohibited from owning guns is those who have been “adjudicated as mentally defective.” It’s an archaic way of saying people with fairly serious mental illnesses, and, to be fair, this is probably one group that probably should be prohibited from owning guns, if for no other reason than they’re not responsible for themselves to any reasonable degree. Most have caretakers, almost as if they’re children.

But one of the examples of fearmongering we’ve seen from the anti-gun media is that among the ATF rules being changed is one that will supposedly allow crazy people to have guns.

Yes, we all know it’s BS, but let’s get into why it’s BS, shall we?

The criteria for who is mentally defective includes someone who is a danger to himself, can’t manage his own affairs, or has been found insane by a court. In its enforcement definition, the ATF included definitions from the Veterans Affairs department, which states a “mentally incompetent person is one who because of injury or disease lacks the mental capacity to contract or to manage his or her own affairs, including disbursement of funds without limitation.” So, the ATF added to its list of banned people those whom the VA said were bad at managing their finances.

The ATF says that its definitions of who may not have a gun has been, for decades, too broad. “ATF believes its current regulation defining ‘adjudicated as a mental defective’ is overbroad because it encompasses individuals who do not suffer from the kinds of mental disabilities that fell within the term ‘mental defective,’”says the ATF. Moreover:

Those with isolated functional deficits are not the kind of individuals who were understood to be mentally defective as that term was used in the GCA. Nor are such individuals the kind of irresponsible or dangerous persons who Congress sought to prohibit from possessing firearms under [the law].”

Now, the ATF says, some of the people banned shouldn’t have been. The new rule proposal would “make clear that individuals who present solely with isolated functional deficits, such as the inability to manage their government benefits, are not mentally defective.”

I’ve written a lot about the whole fiasco with the VA stripping people of their gun rights, and while the VA has stopped doing that and is working to undo it for an untold number of veterans, it’s good that the ATF is fixing it from their end as well.

For a long time, the unstated goal of the ATF was to disarm as many people as possible. Gun ownership wasn’t viewed as a right, but something that should be curtailed so that only a select group of people could enjoy. Every action seemed dedicated to restricting our Second Amendment rights as much as they could, and that involved engaging in some…flexibility with regard to the parameters given to them by Congress.

So, they included a lot of people who aren’t a threat to anyone who isn’t inclined to hurt them, all because they thought that was the job. It wasn’t. It was never the intention of any law passed by Congress involving gun ownership and serious mental illness.

Not everyone with a mental illness is a danger. I’ve dealt with both anxiety and depression in my life, and I still deal with them, but shooting and maintaining my guns helps me deal with both. My issues don’t make me a danger to anyone, and exercising my rights helps me when times are less than ideal.

But some think I should be disarmed because of these conditions, even if they’re under control. Many in the ATF, at least in the past, would have had me disarmed for them.

What the Trump administration and today’s ATF are doing is correcting things so that it can’t happen, either to me or to millions of other Americans who may have found themselves on the bad end of the stick.

Everyone else needs to calm down, because dangerous people who might hurt everyone they see are still prohibited.

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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