RE: As much as I disagree with pickle, he is correct in his

Posted on: December 14, 2017 at 10:08:42 CT

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/congratulations-your-donation-to-the-aclu-just-helped-arm-the-mentally-ill-no-not-really/article/2613834

If you read the headlines, you must think the U.S. House did something truly horrible yesterday.

NPR: House Votes To Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales To the Severely Mentally Ill.
Dan Abrams' horribly named LawzNewz: House Votes to Repeal Prohibition on Guns for People With Mental Disorders.
MSNBC: House Republicans vote to expand gun access for mentally impaired.

I could add a few more, but you get the point.

So what did the House actually vote on? First of all, they didn't "expand" anything — their vote (along with concurrence in the Senate and the president's signature) will merely prevent a late Obama-era rule from going into effect. So no one will be able to buy guns now who couldn't do so as recently as last year under the Brady Bill.

Second, the repeal of this rule doesn't allow people to buy guns who have been properly adjudicated by a court of law as mentally ill or unstable. What it prevents the Social Security Administration from stripping people's rights on the mere ground that they receive Disability for a mental impairment that keeps them from working, and "use a representative payee to help manage their benefits."

The Obama-era rule was designed to take away people's rights without due process of law. It would have flagged the names of people who, for example, have an anxiety disorder or depression which keeps them from working, and who, as the SSA puts it, "need help in managing [their] personal money affairs." As the many non-political mental health and autism advocacy groups that supported the House action noted, there is no link between these factors and a propensity for violence.

More importantly — and this is why the American Civil Liberties Union backed it — the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

No person shall be ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

For the same reason government cannot take gun rights away from people who have been placed on secret terror lists by the authorities and not charged or convicted of crimes, it also cannot take them away from people who have not been deemed mentally unfit for gun ownership by a proper court of law.

The Social Security Administration is an executive branch agency. Like the Department of Homeland Security when it deals with green-card holders, the SSA lacks the power to take away the rights of those with whom it interacts without a court's say-so.

This is why America's new favorite charity, the American Civil Liberties Union (along with many other groups that are not particularly conservative or pertinent to gun rights per se) advocated and wrote in favor of what House Republicans did yesterday. This is from the ACLU's letter of support:

On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), we urge members of the House of Representatives to support the resolution disapproving the final rule of the Social Security Administration which implements the National Instant Criminal Background Check System Improvement Amendment Acts of 2007....
...In December 2016, the SSA promulgated a final rule that would require the names of all Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit recipients – who, because of a mental impairment, use a representative payee to help manage their benefits – be submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used during gun purchases.
We oppose this rule because it advances and reinforces the harmful stereotype that people with mental disabilities, a vast and diverse group of citizens, are violent. There is no data to support a connection between the need for a representative payee to manage one's Social Security disability benefits and a propensity toward gun violence. The rule further demonstrates the damaging phenomenon of "spread," or the perception that a disabled individual with one area of impairment automatically has additional, negative and unrelated attributes. Here, the rule automatically conflates one disability-related characteristic, that is, difficulty managing money, with the inability to safely possess a firearm.
The rule includes no meaningful due process protections prior to the SSA's transmittal of names to the NICS database. The determination by SSA line staff that a beneficiary needs a representative payee to manage their money benefit is simply not an "adjudication" in any ordinary meaning of the word. Nor is it a determination that the person "[l]acks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs" as required by the NICS. Indeed, the law and the SSA clearly state that representative payees are appointed for many individuals who are legally competent...
...[R]egulation of firearms and individual gun ownership or use must be consistent with civil liberties principles, such as due process, equal protection, freedom from unlawful searches, and privacy. All individuals have the right to be judged on the basis of their individual capabilities, not the characteristics and capabilities that are sometimes attributed (often mistakenly) to any group or class to which they belong. A disability should not constitute grounds for the automatic per se denial of any right or privilege, including gun ownership.

So, if you donated the ACLU after President Trump's executive travel ban, congratulations. Yesterday's vote was your victory, too.

And for the media outlets that represented this vote dishonestly, you're trying to sway public opinion in favor of those who would take away people's rights without due process of law.