printGun-restriction advocates want nothing more than to restrain “predisposed” individuals before they transgress. The central authorities will decide who falls within this extremely plastic category. The same planners will act with the complicit assistance of the pseudo-scientific profession of psychiatry. Seriously: How long before the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM # infinity) invents a diagnosis of gun incompatibility disorder? Against this kind of prior-restraint argument even Ivy league statists have argued, albeit with respect to limitations on speech only.
We are witnessing today a tremendous and ominous expansion of preventive law in the area of civil liberties. More and more, our controls are being devised not as punishment for actual wrongful conduct, but with a view to preventing future evils by a series of restrictions and qualifications that seriously jeopardize freedom …
In the spirit of prior restraint is the case of a veteran who presented with symptoms of insomnia and had his guns confiscated. (With the active encouragement of the liberty loving police force. It figures. The local police monopoly certainly made snide comments of displeasure on handing me my firearm license.) Via American Thinker:
New York State Police ordered the permanent confiscation of Mr. Montgomery’s registered handguns after he sought treatment for insomnia. The confiscation was ordered under Cuomo’s “SAFE Act” gun-control law.
The allegations in the case are downright scary. The complaint contends that Montgomery, a Navy veteran and retired police officer who rose to the rank of detective sergeant during his 30-year career, voluntarily sought treatment for insomnia at a hospital on Long Island in May of 2014 after relocating to a new home several hundred miles from his previous residence.
According to the suit, the hospital diagnosed the plaintiff as “mildly depressed,” and his clinical evaluation stated, “Patient has no thoughts of hurting himself. Patient has no thoughts of hurting others. Patient is not having suicidal thoughts. Patient is not having homicidal thoughts…” and “there is no evidence of any psychotic processes, mania, or OCD symptoms. Insight, judgment, and impulse control are good.” The suit further alleges that a psychiatrist told the plaintiff, “I don’t know why you were referred here. You don’t belong here.”
Nonetheless, the suit contends that five days after being discharged from the hospital, the local sheriff’s department showed up at Montgomery’s door and seized his four registered handguns, including his former duty sidearm, after the sheriff had been subjected to “repeated pressure” by the New York State Police, who claimed that Montgomery had been declared mentally defective and had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.
The gun confiscation aforementioned is a logical conclusion to prior restraint legal arguments.
Mentioned above is the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). The Rosetta Stone of the profession has grown since its inception in the 1950s from 60 categories of abnormal behavior to over 410 diagnostic labels and counting. Many of the disorders described in it are more about trend and niche than science.
In the late 1990s, I told readers of my Calgary Herald column about one Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard associate professor and a well-respected, prominent psychiatrist, who claimed, in his 1997 book Shadow Syndromes, that quirky behaviors were actually mild mental illnesses resulting from brain dysfunction.
The lout who is appropriately obsequious with the boss because he knows where his bread is buttered, but who is less dainty with the wife, even thumping her occasionally, would be a candidate for compassion. He is after all doing battle with what Dr. Ratey terms “Intermittent Rage Disorder”. And the dad who dotes on his children while they are with him, but fails to mail them child support money as soon as they are out of sight, is simply afflicted with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: He remembers his kids only when they are around. Is there proof for these sub-rosa disease categories? None whatsoever, although this has not prevented Ratey and many like him from coating their pronouncements with a patina of scientific respectability—and then cashing in.
Given the tenuous ties between psychiatry and science, how likely is it that “evidence” for new diagnoses will be marshaled in order to keep more people from being able to defend their lives and loved ones with guns?
Very likely.