APPEALS COURT STRIKES DOWN FEDERAL GUN LAW AS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Today’s ruling was prompted by the efforts of 73-year-old Clifford Charles Tyler to purchase a gun. His application for a permit was denied because he spent one month in a mental institution, in 1986, due to emotional problems following his divorce. (According to the background material in the 6th Circuit Court decision, his ex-wife allegedly cleaned out his bank accounts and ran off with another man, leaving Tyler so despondent that he wept incessantly, couldn’t sleep, and had suicidal thoughts. He was committed for treatment after his fearful daughters called the police. He never did anything more violent than pound on his own head in despair.)
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That didn’t pass muster with Judge Danny Boggs, who drew a sharp distinction between the need to keep guns away from the mentally ill, and an unconstitutional burden placed upon rehabilitated individuals with brief periods of difficulty in their distant past. Somehow I suspect gun-control zealots will spectacularly fail to draw that distinction, and parody the 6th Circuit Court’s decision as “putting guns in the hands of madmen,” which they claim is an unwritten bullet point in the hidden agenda of the National Rifle Association. (Once again, pardon the pun.)
This attitude would seem difficult to square with the Left’s general enthusiasm for restoring the rights of criminals as quickly as possible – especially their voting rights – on the grounds that no one’s life should be permanently ruined for anything less than the most heinous offense. The gun-control movement will cast those principles aside in order to argue that public safety is unacceptably compromised by allowing a 73-year-old man who spent a month in an institution for emotional distress when he was 45 to buy a gun… something even the law as written would have permitted, if the government had given him a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate his rehabilitation.
Today’s ruling was prompted by the efforts of 73-year-old Clifford Charles Tyler to purchase a gun. His application for a permit was denied because he spent one month in a mental institution, in 1986, due to emotional problems following his divorce. (According to the background material in the 6th Circuit Court decision, his ex-wife allegedly cleaned out his bank accounts and ran off with another man, leaving Tyler so despondent that he wept incessantly, couldn’t sleep, and had suicidal thoughts. He was committed for treatment after his fearful daughters called the police. He never did anything more violent than pound on his own head in despair.)
[clip]
That didn’t pass muster with Judge Danny Boggs, who drew a sharp distinction between the need to keep guns away from the mentally ill, and an unconstitutional burden placed upon rehabilitated individuals with brief periods of difficulty in their distant past. Somehow I suspect gun-control zealots will spectacularly fail to draw that distinction, and parody the 6th Circuit Court’s decision as “putting guns in the hands of madmen,” which they claim is an unwritten bullet point in the hidden agenda of the National Rifle Association. (Once again, pardon the pun.)
This attitude would seem difficult to square with the Left’s general enthusiasm for restoring the rights of criminals as quickly as possible – especially their voting rights – on the grounds that no one’s life should be permanently ruined for anything less than the most heinous offense. The gun-control movement will cast those principles aside in order to argue that public safety is unacceptably compromised by allowing a 73-year-old man who spent a month in an institution for emotional distress when he was 45 to buy a gun… something even the law as written would have permitted, if the government had given him a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate his rehabilitation.
