NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre floated the idea of a national registry of the mentally ill as one way to stem gun violence.
“How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”
Like the hypocrisy of throwing the First Amendment under the bus ( the media and constraints on speech are rather regulated), there is another glaring hypocrisy in the above statement.
First the fact that 38 states already use mental health records in background checks and that the Gun Control Act of 1968 (established after the death of Robert Kennedy) says that anyone who has been involuntarily committed or anyone who has been determined by a court to be a danger to themselves or others are prohibited from possessing firearms.
The NRA gave the statement:
"200 million guns did not strike down Senator Kennedy; only one did."
Sound familiar?
Also while all for creating a database of the mentall ill, the NRA has time and time again opposed databases.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is calling on its membership to help repeal a 1989 law that created the Virginia Firearms Transaction Program (VFTP). A state-of-the-art database that is second to none in the nation, the VFTP works in conjunction with the FBI’s National Instant Background Checks System (NICS) to check the background of those purchasing firearms in the Commonwealth of Virginia [...] In an August 18 alert to its members, the NRA described the VFTP as “obsolete and unnecessary.” [...]
This is not the first time the NRA has attempted to undermine the background check system for firearm purchasers. After the Brady Act was signed in 1994, the NRA funded lawsuits in nine different states that sought to have the law struck down as unconstitutional. The NRA argued that states could not be compelled to submit records to the federal background check system maintained by the FBI. The Supreme Court agreed with that principle, but rejected the NRA’s argument that “the whole statute must be voided.” In large part because of this litigation, millions of records are missing today from NICS that otherwise would be stopping dangerous individuals from buying guns.