NRA Backed Gun Control goes to Pres.

24thMICH
Levergunner


Joined: 07 Sep 2007
Posts: 4
Location: MI
Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 7:41 pm Post subject: Active Dangerousness

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I was going to post this in Old Ironsides' thread about the NRA regarding the mental health provisions. I first hit the "reply" button, and by the time I finished composing my text, the thread had been locked.

Normally I would leave well enough alone, but the thread was so full of misconceptions about mental health, illness and what is or is not considered dangerous I felt my response needed to be posted.

While I live and work in Michigan, I'm pretty confident the legal situation here is not all that different from the other states.

Here's what I was going to post to Old Ironsides' thread:

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Please allow me as a mental health professional (15+ years working as the coordinator of a psychiatric crisis team to the ER of a large suburban hospital right outside of Detroit as well as close to 13 years now working with college students, both real good ones as well as some really sick puppies not all that different from the VTech shooter) to make a few distinctions:

There seems to be a lot of misinformation about "crazy people," about medications and various mental disorders and about involuntary hospitalization.

Most people with a mental disorder aren't "crazy." Most people taking medication are taking it either for an anxiety disorder or for varying levels of dysthymia, depression or bipolar disorder (formerly called "manic-depression"). These people are not at all violent towards other people on average. The average person suffering from severe depression is at higher risk for suicide, not homicide or any other kind of violence towards other people.

Most "crazy" people are not violent. Most "crazy" people suffer from schizophrenia and are typically disorganized and chaotic in their everyday lives. They are usually very passive and very slow moving, on or off of their medications. The only time they typically might be dangerous towards others is when they are being forced to do something they don't want to do, like take their medication, go into an ambulance, go into a psych. hospital or leave their apartments. Their dangerousness towards others usually results from a flailing of fists and from random kicks and bites.

As far as the mental health laws of the State of Michigan are concerned, taking medication or voluntarily admitting yourself into a mental health facility, whether it be an outpatient clinic or an inpatient facility, does not qualify you as being dangerous to yourself or to other people, nor does it as far as I know disqualify you from owning any type of firearm in the State of Michigan.

The only action which results in an individual losing his firearms-owning status in the State of Michigan is if that person has been adjudicated as "actively dangerous" to himself or another person in a court of law and has been involuntarily committed to an inpatient treatment facility as a result. Usually the process begins when a person is brought into an Emergency Room, typically after a suicide threat. A mental health professional--typcially a psychiatric social worker or less frequently a clinical psychologist or psychiatric nurse practictioner--is called in to interview the patient. If that patient makes specific statements that meet the criteria for what is called "active dangerousness," then that mental health worker fills out a Petition for Hospitalization, while the attending physician in the ER fills out a Physician's Certificate. Once that is completed and assuming a bed in a local psychiatric hospital inpatient unit has been found, that person is transported via ambulance to the hospital (in the case of the patient not having any insurance and the EMS carrier refusing to do the transport, the paperwork is shown to the local county sheriff and they end up doing the transport on the county's dime). Once the patient arrives in the Admissions Department of the psychiatric facility, he or she is interveiwed a second time by the attending psychiatrist, who okays or denies the admission. At that point, the law says the patient has to be seen in a local court of law within 72 hours for a judge to legally certify the admission. If the judge refuses the certification, then the patient has to be released regardless of the psychiatrist's opinion. That rarely happens, but it does occasionally.

"Active dangerousness" has a very specific definition. It's not the same thing as generalized dangerousness. A person can say "I want to kill myself" but be vague or indeterminate as to when or how. You can say such a person is at risk for killing himself but not actively dangerous to himself. You couldn't hospitalize him against his will in the State of Michigan. He has to say "I plan to kill myself in the next 24 hours by jumping off the Mackinaw Bridge or by taking this vial of cyanide I have stored in the trunk of my car." or something just that specific. If a person said to a mental health worker "I want to kill that guy who just had an affair with my wife," that mental health worker has a legal obligation to inform the adulterer in question of the husband's statement (this is called the "duty to warn"), but the cuckolded husband himself could not be hospitalized or lose his right to a firearm in the State of Michigan unless he said something to the effect of "I plan on taking that SOB out tomorrow afternoon with my brand new Alaskan .50."

In other words, active dangerousness occurs if it is:

1) specific as to plan and is realistic as to implements (if a person says he plans to kill another person with the M-16 he plans to steal first from Ft. Dix, then his statement fails on the "realism" scale unless he is in fact a soldier stationed at Fr. Dix);

2) the person states he plans to implement the harmful deed on himself or to another person within 24-48 hours, depending on the local jurisdiction. In most counties in Michigan the time frame is 24 hours.

Potential or eventual dangerousness is not in the same ballpark as active dangerousness and is treated in a totally different legal venue, at least in Michigan these days. Sometimes as a mental health professoinal this can be exasperating, as there have been times I knew somebody would eventually kill himself, but couldn't do anything more than work with him to stave it off and to constantly be on alert for active dangerousness. I can't begin to tell you how distressing it is and at the same time how whized off I get when a female, for instance, suffering from borderline personality disorder, which is marked by many parasuicidal behaviors (such as cutting oneself in order to express anger, to get attention or to manipulate a boyfriend to do what he otherwise wouldn't agree to do), finally miscalculates and ends up dead. As a treatment professional, you can see it coming "eventually" but can't do anything about it. When it happens (usually on weekends or late at night when nobody's around to find and/or rescue the person) there's this sense of futility compounded by having to deal with the public perception that "the mental health people should have been able to do something about this, and they're heartless *******s that they didn't!"

In my view, most people taking medication, who've been hospitalized in an inpatient psychiatric facility or who were suicidal or homicidal at some time in the past but who are no longer so, should have exactly the same Second Amendment rights as the rest of us have. These rights are given to all of us and to them by God, not by government. This is something we as Americans have to always remember.

The only time a person's right to self-defense should be compromised is when that person is an active danger to himself or to other people, or if the person has been adjudicated as being chronically mentally incompetent such that he or she could not be expected to behave responsibly in the presence of a firearm (such as somebody sufficiently retarded or psychotically disorganized that they could not be expected to maintain awareness of safe firearm usage). Such people normally reside in supervised residential settings already, such as my chronically schizophrenic sister-in-law.

I have this argument with my biological older sister all the time. Not quite 20 years ago she was involuntarily hospitalized for suicidal depression, yet has been fine for about the last 15 years while on her medications. She likes the fact that the law does not allow her to buy or own a firearm, while I say she should have her right to buy and own them restored. She asks me "do you know what I could have done if I'd have had a gun!?" I reply "I know what you could have done with all the steak knives you had in the kitchen drawer but chose not to use. You still own all those steak knives, as well as a potentially lethal automobile, a boxcutter and some hedge trimmers sitting in your tool shed. Why should you not be trusted with a firearm, which is no more and no less than a tool like these other tools you own?"

In addition to the NRA, I typically advise folks to join the GOA as well as the JPFO and the Gun Owners Alliance. The other three organizations do their best to keep the NRA honest.