Not to be outdone by Texas, apparently, my state of Georgia has done it’s own questionable approach to managing ‘mental health and guns’.
Georgia regularly just deletes a large number of records of people who have been “involuntarily committed’ for mental health issues from the background check database, allowing them to once again pass the background checks for guns. Sure, it has added thousands of names, but it’s also clearing a bunch of them as well. Without any review process or anything: 5 years on the list and then deleted.
It may seem fair on the surface but the problem is there is apparently no rhyme or reason guiding this expunging of data. And Georgia is the ONLY state that does it this way.
And while we will NOT conflate “mental illness’ with AUTOMATICALLY being “dangerous” sometimes people who ARE ill or unstable do NOT need to have access to a gun: A Modern Conundrum.
Because in Georgia, it’s the law: once a record of a commitment in Georgia has been on the National Instant Background Check System for five years, state law requires that it be removed. So even as the state is adding hundreds of commitment records each year, it is also deleting hundreds more as they hit the five-year limit.
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The names come off the national list without any review by a doctor or a court. Although these are federal records, participation in the program by each state is voluntary and subject to conditions the state may impose.
The act of placing people who have been ‘committed’ to a mental health institution as authorized more than 10 years ago by the GBI
Only mentally ill people who are involuntarily committed for inpatient treatment are reported to the FBI for the purpose of gun background checks. People who are ordered to have an evaluation but then agree to admit themselves for treatment are not reported. Neither are mentally ill people treated as outpatients, whether the treatment is voluntary or involuntary.
So it is focused on people who have been ‘committed’ — involuntarily placed on an inpatient hospital unit for some form of ‘treatment’. Not somebody who is evaluated and released, which is not, in itself, a foolproof process.
The article quotes one Judge who expressed grave concern about this caveat, saying just because they did not get admitted for treatment or signed in voluntarily doesn’t mean they are actually fit to own a gun.
I am a licensed Professional Counselor in Georgia. I have a master’s degree and decades of experience as well as a professional license that allows me to do psychotherapy and mental health works and accept money for doing so, to be super-technical. I have worked inpatient hospitals, outpatient mental health clinics, partial hospitalization, group home, community-based programs, children families, and adults with a wide variety of issues.
Forever, my professional association, the LPCA, has worked to get LPC’s granted to the authority to sign off on the 1013, the Georgia form for involuntary transport to an emergency receiving facility for the purpose of mental health evaluation. I can sign that and have a couple times since the law was passed.
In 2014 it had come up for a vote and was shelved for a couple reasons, a main one, really, was all the wingnuts and teabaggers in the Georgia government were concerned that more mental health practitioners with this power would translate — take a deep breath — into more people being banned from owning guns.
I went to seek a link to show you I am not making that up and the LPCA site has been upgraded and at this time I can’t really access it. (You’ve seen that happen before, right?) But I did find a blurb in an email sent to me by the LPCA
Everyone did an amazing job calling, emailing, and visiting the Capital, which is why the bill made it all the way to the House of Representatives Calendar for a vote. The last opposition was the Gun Bill Advocates which fueled the belief that adding more mental health professionals to have the ability to 1013 will mean more hospitalizations. The Gun Bill included language that specified if a person was involuntarily hospitalized they could not get a gun permit.
So, not making it up.
One of the arguments FOR having LPC’s be able to sign the 1013 is the huge number of very rural areas in Georgia (translation: places educated professionals do not want to live) have no MD’s or RN’s or Nurse Practitioners that can actually sign the legal document calling for people with suspected mental illness issues to be transported to a proper emergency room for proper evaluation.
Yet these same areas are heavily-represented by people that believe in guns uber alles: they very much prefer for people to have guns over mental health evaluation and treatment. Thank goodness we prevailed.
One reason we prevailed — or appear to have — is that the law was placed on a sunset clause: we would have about 10 months to have the authority to to sign this extremely important document so that data could be collected, to see if it is actually helping and if it, I suppose, causes lots of people to lose their guns.
When you are considering a 1013 on somebody they have to be a danger to themselves or others. That is the defining characteristic. I have 1013’d suicidal people, wildly psychotic people, but no homicidal folks. The psychotic people were just so out of it they were at risk of wandering into busy streets and such. Just being psychotic isn’t quite enough.
The Law — SB 53 — is up this year for review to hopefully make it permanent. I have no idea where we stand on permanence, but I haven’t heard anything scary yet. It can only be useful to have us (LPCs) available to sign these documents.
Back to the issue: This is the nightmare scenario
John Houser killed himself after fatally shooting two people and wounding nine in a Louisiana movie theater in July. He legally bought his gun even though in 2008 a Carroll County, Ga., probate judge ordered him to be evaluated. Judge Betty Cason told Channel 2 Action News she never received a petition to commit him from the doctors who evaluated him; consequently, his name never appeared on the FBI database. His mental illness was documented in other public records in Carroll County dating to the 1990s.
While thankfully, these incidents are few and far between, personally and professionally, I feel there needs to be a clarification of how people are removed from the database specifically to avoid this. We do not want to stigmatize mentally ill people, deny them their rights as an American, but we do not want to put the community at risk just so people can have guns.
As one republican is quoted in the article, and with which I agree (mark your calendars) is that one’s mental illness in ones 20’s is likely going to be different in their 50’s, but even then, it is the case by case nature of mental illness that makes the scrubbing of names from the list difficult to do.
Deleting people off the list in bulk, I think, is crazy. It’s a huge potential liability. It’s also crazy to try and interfere in the mental health evaluation process — a process focused on protecting the patent and the community — just because a politician or others are cross-eyed about ‘guns’.
I say that not just because I would prefer to retain the authority, which I do prefer for a variety of reasons, but because it is just not rational to place the availability of guns above mental health needs and issues of people, and above the safety of the community at large. And that is exactly what reducing mental health input into the background checks does.
I must add this: I am not supportive of ‘gun confiscation’, I do not “hate guns”, nor do I see most guns as “evil”: assault weapons, those made to kill large numbers of people in short amounts of time are an evil in a civilized society. They are fine in the military but it’s INSANE to have them in civilian society. It’s inappropriate. I don’t care what the gun nuts say: I don’t. There is no need for those sorts of weapons in civilian society. None. There are PLENTY of other guns.
I do support legislation that would strip the rights of ownership from people who don’t need or cannot handle guns/keep them secure. Go to youtube and search for “gun fail” and you can see a huge list of people who should not be allowed to own guns.
We already have plenty of precedence for this: people with felony convictions, people with severe mental health issues, if they can be documented properly.
A policy can be created that regularly reviews people’s records if they are coming up for expungement to ensure they do not still have active/significant mental health issues. It would cost money but jobs would be created. It wouldn’t be “perfect’ but nothing really is. It would be vastly better which means some improvement in ‘safety’.
Lastly: let us not forget that MOST ‘mentally ill” people are not notably dangerous. Being prudent with an eye toward community safety in no way requires stigmatizing people with mental illness.
They are to be helped, not feared.
And making sure they can buy guns doesn’t help them: funding for mental illness care and treatment does. Hint, hint.