By AWR Hawkins
Washington DC – -(Ammoland.com)- On December 18 2014, a three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a ban on gun purchases for anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to a mental institution” violated the Second Amendment rights of a Michigan man who was denied a gun purchase because of a mental institution commitment in 1986.
According to The Wall Street Journal, 73-year-old Clifford Charles Taylor “recently attempted to buy a gun but was denied on the grounds that he had been committed by a court to a mental institution in 1986 after emotional problems associated with a divorce.”
Judge Danny Boggs wrote the majority opinion for the panel: “The government’s interest in keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill is not sufficiently related to depriving the mentally healthy, who had a distant episode of commitment, of their constitutional rights.”
On October 17, 2013, Breitbart News reported that Mayo Clinic psychiatrist, J. Michael Bostwick, M.D., warned that the push to take Second Amendment rights away from the mentally ill was misplaced. He said, “The majority of mentally ill people aren’t dangerous” and that the attempt to bar every person who has ever had a mental health diagnosis from gun ownership would do nothing to reduce high profile, gun-related crimes.
He stressed that “as long as the Second Amendment is the law of the land, the right of the people to keep and bear arms … will be an integral part of the American scene.”
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.
About:
AWR Hawkins writes for all the BIG sites, for Pajamas Media, for RedCounty.com, for Townhall.com and now AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.
His southern drawl is frequently heard discussing his take on current events on radio shows like America’s Morning News, the G. Gordon Liddy Show, the Ken Pittman Show, and the NRA’s Cam & Company, among others. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (summer 2010), and he holds a PhD in military history from Texas Tech University.
If you have questions or comments, email him at [email protected]. You can find him on facebook at www.facebook.com/awr.hawkins.
Hmmm… I’m a gun nut that takes anti-depressants. How much of a nut does that make me? Society has an interest in keeping guns away from the dangerously mentally ill, but the individual has an interest in protecting and preserving their rights. Good on the plaintiff for fighting this, and good on the court for saying that the law was drafted too broadly. Expect for another, narrower version of this law that gets closer to the actual need.
Did you ever notice how anti-gun liberals often refer to 2nd Amendment supporters as “gun nuts”? I resent being grouped with the ‘mentally ill’. How about you?
How did our currently socialist gov’nt find out this man had been committed to a mental inst. in ’86 in the first place ?