‘No compromise’ gun groups shoot themselves in the foot
Gun Owners of America (GOA) has been attacking New Hampshires Senate Bill 244 from the beginning with the shock propaganda phrase, See a shrink, lose your guns. The New Hampshire Firearms Coalition (NHFC) has adopted the GOA slogan. Theyre both wrong. And tragically, that slogan may scare people away from getting the mental health help they really need.
SB 244 would add New Hampshire to the other 37 states that report mental health gun-possession disqualifiers in the same way as felony conviction gun disqualifiers to the FBIs National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NCIS), which licensed dealers must query by phone when they sell a gun. Importantly, it also would create, for the first time, a legal mechanism to un-prohibit people whose mental health problems have been cured.
The New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee is considering an amendment proposed by the committee chair, Sen. Sharon Carson, R-Londonderry, that would retain the second part of the bill to allow people to remove themselves from the disqualified list while deferring the first part to a commission to investigate its nuances. Unaccountably, GOA and the NHFC oppose even this version.
The problem with the see a shrink, lose your guns rhetoric is that its simply not true. People who object to SB 244 keep saying that the bill would disqualify people from possessing guns, but thats a huge mistake: the people who would be reported to NICS are already disqualified. They are disqualified whether their names are on NICS or not.
http://www.unionleader.com/article/20140311/OPINION02/140319908/0/FRONTPAGE