Throwaway05
7d ago
I frankly have no idea how the judge in question here can honestly take a look at a forty-year period with no criminal history or further interactions with the mental health system or criminal justice system,
I think the implication of the proceedings was that this was not true, clearly wasn't true, and the court didn't want to waste time and money on sorting it so used other procedural grounds to close the matter.
Most people who fail in these kinds of proceedings are so allergic to basic competence and not being an entitled asshole that nobody who actually witnesses the situation feels bad. In the same that you look at most police encounters and go: "Should he have beat his ass? No. Did he absolutely earn it? Yes."
Most principled third parties read about these situations and fear some authoritarian judge taking rights away (which does happen) but the vast majority is "please give me something, anything to work with.....okay I guess you won't."
Throwaway05
7d ago
There are always limitations. If I state that I have the right to murder people I disagree with because murder is expression of my speech. I will get laughed out of court for making this argument.
For 2A there are limitations..... well first of all what is a gun? I say a tank, a Warthog, and a fissile device are all guns. The court may say they are not guns and therefore I have no constitutional right to them. Some fictional guns are gun shaped and launch projectiles but are sufficient to destroy the planet. The government better ban them, I live on the planet.
Limitations must exist, else you live in a society where I can murder you legally for no reason because I assert it is my constitutional right to do so.
I don't think you believe that no limits should be placed on constitutional rights though, I think you are mad at the current limits, which are more expansive than what I'm asking for.
American citizen Jihadis absolutely have the right to guns if they haven't been convicted of crimes. We can't just have a member of the priesthood point to them and say "Man, those are some BAD muzzies" and no guns for them.
This is in bad faith. I didn't say Jihadis couldn't have guns. I said they couldn't have nukes. That is an example of a common sense limitation.
Certain people can't be trusted with certain powers. Determining this adequately is hard and frustrating. Nearly nobody should be trusted with nukes. Nearly everybody should be trusted with a fork and knife.
If you want to criticize an aspect of the current plan you need to either assert that no rights limitations are appropriate (which you have alluded to but not actually done) or come up with an alternative solution to the problem.
Throwaway05
7d ago
I think you can probably draw a line of separation between "normal" people who have personality traits, tendencies, hobbies, and political views I do not like and people who have severe mental illness (or an episode of the same with increased risk of recurrence).
Admittedly this guy was a lot further back so that the standards were different then they are today after some testing and improvement, but you have to work very hard to earn an involuntary stay and be very poorly behaved. Almost ALWAYS it involves true serious mental illness such and Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, severe Borderline, or MDD with suicide attempt or suicidal ideation. Or. It involves someone who is so unpleasant, uncooperative, violent, etc. that they are almost always a dangerous criminal they just might not have gotten caught yet (and the latter bucket is much less common).
If you are a threat to yourself or someone else in a real and foreseeable way you will likely be so again and the amount of danger is quite a bit higher. This is not "I dislike Nazis and they could do bad things!!!" this is "30% chance of murdering someone."
Throwaway05
7d ago
The constitution is not a suicide pact, case law establishes restrictions to constitutional rights, 1A is the biggest place we see this. You aren't allowed to say anything and everything. This has been tested in a court of law to make sure that deranged actors do not ruin society and devastate the rights of others (admittedly with varying success and priorities).
The same for 2A. Jihadis can't have a right to nukes just because they are American citizens. That is not sensible. You can still be pro-2A and think that murders have lost their right to guns.
Ultimately your right to live supersedes my example crazy guys right to own a gun. If you believe otherwise you are in a gross minority.
If you think this guy doesn't have a right to kill you then you need to come up with a different way to prevent that because the legal system has already come up with their approach and you criticizing it can be easily blown off with "okay but like, how are you going to be sure you/your family doesn't get murdered?"
If you don't like the solution propose a different one that doesn't get you shot in the head for no reason.
Throwaway05
7d ago
You have not proposed an alternative.
If your neighbor goes off of his medication and keeps following you around as you leave your house saying "Nybbler you raped me, I'm going to shoot you."
What do you want to do with this guy? Sure you could get him committed, but he'll be admitted, get stabilized, go home and go off his meds again and then go buy a gun and shoot you.
Especially in NJ the cops won't get involved because it is clearly a psychiatric matter not a criminal one.
Throwaway05
7d ago
This is not about NJ gun laws this is about the more general involuntary commitment process.
How do you want to prevent people who want to hurt themselves or others from owning firearms?
If you don't like the current state what do you want instead?
For other rights we prohibit people from abusing them (see: restrictions on free speech such as harassment).
Throwaway05
7d ago
Where do you get off the train?
-Involuntary commitments are always correct.
-The type of people who are involuntary committed are not safe to own guns.
-Even if both of those true, you need a trial to take the guns away.
If the problem is the third option, how much are you willing to pay to facilitate that? Are you willing to have people temporarily held in custody in some form until after the hearing, because they've been tentatively described as someone who can't have guns for safety reasons but they can't be taken yet?
Your frustration with overall NJ gun laws (which are braindead) make it easy to miss Chesterton's fence, the alternatives are force.
If the problem is the first part, well fair, but they are probably similarly level of correctness to felony charges and that stuff.
If the problem is the second part...you need to encounter some people who are being committed.
Overall I think that would change your view right quick.
Throwaway05
7d ago
Some people will give us that info but it's usually pretty useless as make and manufacturer issues mean that the level of variety is high.
Throwaway05
8d ago
(and of course NJ makes voluntary commitment, by which they mean any treatment in a psychiatric facility, and also involuntary outpatient treatment, a permanent bar to gun ownership)
I don't support this.
For the rest of this, well you have a trained professional (in the case of NJ I believe it's two physicians spread out over multiple days) assessing that the person is a threat to themselves or others, and importantly staking their license on it - since they can be sued for this, and with other release valves like the expungement process.
That's not quite the same as a conviction in a court of law by a jury of your peers but continued commitment processes do involve lawyers beyond the initial psychiatric hold.
Importantly the alternative is ass - does every temporary psychiatric hold involve the legal system? Does that mean you need to hold people after they are already better in order to get them to court? The administrative and procedural cost would be high. Most patient's would find being dragged through court by default traumatizing and miserable.
The majority of people committed have either attempted suicide or have a condition that permanently makes them a significant threat to themselves or others (like schizophrenia and bipolar I). While edge cases do exist it is not generally subtle.
Ultimately people have a right to free speech and guns (in the U.S. anyway) but other people have a right to not get killed.
I'll freely admit that the rest of New Jersey's gun control stuff is absolute horseshit, but preventing someone who thinks that everyone on the street is spying on them for Elon Musk and going to rape them from owning weapons is legit.
Throwaway05
8d ago
I will freely admit that sometimes places are a little "soft" with commitment (or lazy) but in general (and uniformly in busier places because resources are scarce) systems are very good at following the law, which varies by state by state.
In essence though the idea is the person needs to be a danger to themselves or others. The way that works out in practice is significant, imminent danger. You might say you have suicidal thoughts, but unless you have a plan and a situation which makes implementing that plan easy and likely then you'll get sent home.
When it comes to homicidal thought content its not "i'm going to kill my wife" its "I went out an bought a gun because I want to kill my wife because she is cheating on me" (and she is not in fact cheating, that's a delusion).
Putting aside the suicide end of things, you basically have to be having something (psychiatric) going on in your life that makes you likely to kill somebody. That gets taken seriously because a lot of these people don't get caught and end up murder suiciding, killing people, and doing things that end up in the news. Getting treatment on board or removing guns from the equation when they present themselves is huge.
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Even with that in mind some people do get discharged from the (medical) hospital after a suicide attempt. When done properly (which is admittedly sticky) the burden for commitment is high. On the homicidal end of things you can credibly be planning to shoot up a school but if it's not psychiatric in nature...off you go (although some will make exceptions for this for the obvious reasons).
Inability to care for oneself is part of the assessment but that almost only comes up with people like chronic schizophrenics who can't feed themselves and so on.
Basically the idea is that (like with a felony) you've had an event that's so bad that it greatly contorts your actuarial risk of bad behavior such that abridgment of your personal rights is appropriate in order to protect others. That's fundamentally what a commitment IS, so taking away guns is not far off from a commitment itself.
Throwaway05
8d ago
Yes and just like queen mab,* contact with them can be quite hazardous.
I do enjoy the "deck the halls with beta blockers olol, olol, olol, olol" joke.
*Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs).
Throwaway05
8d ago
Okay let me actually think about this deeply and come up with what I'd consider acceptable policy.
I figure felony and involuntary commitment should be considered around the same in terms of severity (we'll come back to this).
This means default to no for gun acquisition for people in those categories. People deserve rights including the right not to be limited in their behavior when possible, however other individuals deserve the right to be free of molestation and incidents of bad behavior skyrocket once you look at the pot of the population that are felons or involuntarily committed. Schizophrenics crime rates are lower than many might anticipate but this is in part driven by underreporting and the most heinous crimes in society are committed by violent psychotics, both of those facts should be kept in mind.
Both involuntary commitment and felony charges get misused. Trump is now a felon. A patient who was diagnosed with cancer at age 19, made a credible attempt to end their own life in the setting of that stressor but then survives and has no further interaction with mental health care? Yeah seems like both of those shouldn't be limited.
Therefore there should be an adversarial process to get permission to own a gun again (like an expungement hearing). Yes this puts a time and financial burden on people to regain their rights but they lost them for good reason and the majority of people who go through either of those are appropriately labeled.
Okay so why does this guy not deserve his gun? Well: involuntarily committed. Reading between the lines looks like for good reason at the time despite his protestations to the contrary. Now he also appears somewhat disorganized, likely has mild cognitive impairment and has poor judgement (why was he not organized in his defense? Where's the lawyer? He admits he is lying to healthcare professionals...). It's not unreasonable to assume the guy is full of shit. Navigating expert witness testimony, dealing with HIPAA and subpoenas and all the good stuff is time consuming and expensive, likely it would establish that the guy was lying about ongoing psychiatric care and the reason for his admission, the judge skipped ahead and tried to look for a justification and found one. If the guy hired a lawyer he'd be fine.
For basic rights the idea is probably that both the responsible and irresponsible are supposed to have them (and that includes 2A even though the latter part of that scares people). But once you've gone through the first "hit" it seems reasonable to make the standard now be that you have to be responsible. This guy clearly fails to establish that he is now responsible.
Okay back to why Invol and Felony should be labeled as similar faults.
Maybe the best way to make this case is to look back at one of your other points: "Sure, who are the courts going to believe?"
Most medical schools give students a chance to witness (continued) commitment hearings during the psychiatric clerkship.
Here's how it goes:
Public defender: Don't talk. If you don't talk the judge will let you go.
Patient: Okay.
Judge: Let's begin, on the matter of...
Patient: I DO NOT RESPECT THE COURT'S AUTHORITY THE JUDGE WORKS FOR THE NORTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT AND HE RAPED ME LAST NIGHT.
Public defender: "..."
Their are absolutely doctors and facilities that are soft in their commitments but especially in large urban areas you'll see patients get discharged with situations like:
-"I'm going to go home and kill myself" (16 year old and parents say they can go home safely)
-"I'm going to shoot up the school" (criminal/police matter not a psychiatric one if no pathology is present)
-Patient who won't speak to anyone in the facility because they think everyone works for the CIA but takes steps to shower, eat, and sleep.
Involuntary stays are usually appropriate.
What complicates matters in the public imagination is that most conditions that lead to commitment involve some impairment of insight so when they complain on the internet they withhold details and context and make it seem like they were abused by the system.
Throwaway05
8d ago
I believe a normal person should not have their rights abridged.
However, I believe a convicted murderer shouldn't be allowed to have guns. That's pretty common sense (although I'm sure some disagree), in the same way that I am strongly pro-1A but don't want a nuclear scientist giving detailed instructions to ...certain kinds of people.
Some carve outs should be allowed.
Some people shouldn't own guns.
Another clear category is schizophrenics. Once you get the schizophrenia diagnosis (assuming it is well formulated, which it may not be) then you should never ever allowed to own guns because you don't know what is real and that makes you a huge risk to yourself or others.
If you are involuntarily admitted to the hospital that means at some point you were a imminent serious risk to self or others (thats more or less the commitment criteria in most states), and while some people have one episode and then they are done, generally that is not the case. The risk calculus is instantly much different (sidebar: if you believe people have a right to end their own lives even when they have a potentially modifiable medical or psychiatric condition then this changes the calculus significantly).
While they do get it wrong some times the vast vast majority of committed people have some combination of a. incredibly serious mental illness. b. credible suicidality or homicidality. c. are an absolutely enormous asshole.
Society is almost certainly better off restricting the rights of those three kinds of people and doing so results in less death and crime.
Important to note is that you can sue for inappropriate involuntary commitment and that this is a major cause of malpractice claims. The opportunity to defend yourself from malfeasance is there. Yes psychiatrists have notoriously cheap malpractice insurance.
Throwaway05
8d ago
Commitment hearings are tricky, often there is some type of collusion between the judge and both lawyers. This is because 99/100 the situation is super obvious.
I imagine (as RovScam points out) that the everyone involved quickly identified this guy as a full of shit asshole and they went this way to avoid wasting everyone's time.
It isn't great - and I'm a very strong 2A advocate, but when you see the circumstances that result in admission you realize almost nobody who has been involuntarily should be allowed near a fire arm.
It's like prison. Are some people in prison under false pretenses? Sure. Do they almost all clearly deserve to be in prison. Yup, and it's obvious after five minutes working in a forensic setting.
Throwaway05
8d ago
It's usually more like "do you have any medical problems" "no" "any history of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes?" "no" "what are these scars for" "Oh I had a triple bypass in 2003 and I'm on 8 medications for all that."
Throwaway05
8d ago
I understand that drug names are not necessarily intuitive and while they have some tricks those will be impenetrable to patients.
That said, you need to know what you take, when, how, and why - otherwise you are at significant risk of increased bad outcome (although this obviously depends on what conditions you have).
What we usually recommend the elderly do is have a sheet with that information written out and store it in your wallet so it becomes easier to read out, can be retrieved if you are not arousable and so on.
This advice is good for anybody however.
With respect to this specific patient - we see a class of older men who have a large number of medical problems and put no effort into understanding what those are for, what they are doing about them, how to avoid making them worse and so on. While some of these people are stubborn or anti-medication most just have very low conscientiousness. Not ideal for a first time gun buyer at 80 something.
Throwaway05
9d ago
Reading between the lines (and using some experience with the interaction between medicine and the legal system) my suspicion is that the court and multiple involved parties are aware of this and are more or less working together to block this guy in a paternalistic but likely ultimately wise way.
Throwaway05
9d ago
While each patient is different, much of what you alluded to in your description of events pattern matches to a subset of patients struggling with the way their personality interacts with the world, depression, and anxiety. Modernity blows and that's part of it.
Treating those things through a psychiatric lens is lower impact and cheaper/less risky than more direct intervention, which you will always find people willing to do.* The former works just fine with appropriate buy-in.
However since much of this is likely mediated by modernity...it is also not shocking that you feel better by finding some other way of viewing the world and your experiences.
Be careful with your approach however, you want to make sure it is well formed and can sustain itself should you have more stressors in the future.
*Proceduralists will often operate under the assumption that adequate preparation and work up has been done before their involvement. This is not a good assumption, and ultimately these physicians are those with hammers looking for nails.
Plenty are more diligent and careful but they tend not to get sent more marginal cases for a multitude of reasons.
Throwaway05
9d ago
They get diagnosed with fibromyalgia, CPTSD, hypermobility/EDS, or early onset arthritis. You give up hope they’ll ever be normal.
One of these is (superficially at least) not like the others and that also reveals the likely cause.
I think it is important to emphasize that to some extent we (western medicine) know what this kinda of life experience is about and how to treat it for quite a few people, and at the same time people are not excited about what needs to happen.
This is tough.
I imagine you've had this conversation before and likely are not excited about it, but it must be said both for you and anyone who happens to reading.
Chronic pain comes from a variety of places yes, but absent a physically traumatic event it is often psychiatrically mediated (and things like TMJ point to that). If it is not psychiatrically mediated, then psychiatric care is often important because chronic pain can cause psychiatric dysfunction (ex: depression from being in pain all the time). Either way - part of your care should involve sustained psychiatric follow-up and that would likely improve quality of life.
It is not uncommon for patients with stories like yours to not be down with this.
Often it's because the experience of pain is labeled in some way as "all in your head" and that gets mentally converted to "not real." Well it is real, it is pain those kind of patients are feeling that can respond to treatment but that treatment is generally things like lifestyle modification and psychiatric care and people want a procedure to be done or a "real diagnosis" to be dropped instead often because its simpler or more ego-syntonic.
Some doctors will take advantages of this because they have a research base stating that certain stuff they can bill for will work (and it can) but it also provides risks and has tangible financial costs. That doesn't mean it is the best thing for people (or the best use of resources).
I hope you are better and continue to get better than that but if you are unsatisfied with where you are the best thing you can do for yourself is seek psychiatric help, cases like your own almost always benefit from psychiatric assistance.
Throwaway05
9d ago
Thank you for sharing this!
I enjoyed that in a large part he seems to be sunk by the fact that he can't name his blood pressure medication.
This is vindicating to me, given the number of times I have asked a patient what life saving medicine they are on and gotten the response of "dunno."
Throwaway05
12d ago
All of this below is somewhat moot in the sense that I'm not convinced that Ellison had Bipolar.
Disturbances in cognition exist on a spectrum from "this is not recognized pathology and is just my personality structure" (like a preference for scrambled eggs, a love of baseball, or being an asshole to your girlfriend because you are insecure about your small dick) to "this is purely something with an organic cause and blaming the person for their behavior is asinine" (a classic example benign example is a granny who is violent in the hospital because she's delirious and thinks she's is in a Nazi camp because of a UTI, a classic scarier example is someone who engages in a mass shooting because they have a golf ball sized tumor pressing on a few key structures in their brain).
Cases of the former are much more legitimate to blame (whatever that means) if love of eggs cause problems. Realistically insecurity about the small dick requires some sort of sex therapy or something if the person wants to stop hurting others and have a bit better of an experience of life.
Murder granny gets put in restraints and we treat her UTI and then everyone goes about their business and forgives her afterwards.
When it comes to things in the middle of those two extremes (that is, classic mental illness) we have a similar range. On one end you have personality disorders, like borderline personality disorder. These are in truth diseases of personality construction and really tease at what a "disease" is. It's easy to not feel bad for them (although I encourage you to) and this is true to the point where people don't want to give the diagnosis because of stigma (they give bipolar instead, relevance to Ellison?).
At the other end is one of: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. You could debate which one and they are certainly interesting and have interesting impacts on how much sympathy and guilt we should feel (what do you mean a symptom of the disease is that he doesn't think he has a disease and that's why he doesn't take medication and then ends up hurting people?),
True Bipolar 1 with psychotic features is the most stark here. Again I doubt Ellison had this but this the most sympathy you can have. This is a person with a monster inside them that comes up abruptly and severely because they run a 5k and their metabolism of their lithium changes.
They go from total normal nice person to a violent felon who doesn't sleep, spends their entire family's money and does X,Y, and Z ends up in jail with HIV and then gets started on medication and then goes completely back to normal.
Some people do things that put them at higher rate of an episode, but many people commit no mistakes and still lose.
Living with that should increase sympathy, no?
Most people aren't as stark as the straw patient above, but that is what it can be like.
Throwaway05
17d ago
I have to imagine that the Dems have gotten very good at knifing each other for perceived thought crimes and insufficient demographic achievement. Only those who have been around long enough manage to avoid this through the accumulation of political power manage to survive in this environment.
Too much eating their own.
I do know a lot of young dems who in other times would be stepping up, but they seem to be too white and/or male and therefore stick with the think tanks or party strategist roles (and lead the elders into unpopular decisions).
Throwaway05
17d ago
and if I read 200 pages of a 1000 page story I still consider myself to have "read" it.
That is fair, would do it, and at the same time is antithetical to me haha.
Throwaway05
18d ago
I've read like 200-300 stories in this genre,
How the fuck! So many of them are so damn long.
The legal system in many places in the U.S. has abandoned intervention when a problem is a psychiatric matter and not a criminal one. Some of this is clearly inappropriate such as situations where the police are exhausted or the DA refuses to get involved. Sometimes it is appropriate, if someone is a chronic schizophrenic who has lost touch with reality and is violent then it's not a criminal problem, the guy is obviously not guilty by reason of insanity.
The person does not belong in jail they belong in a state hospital, this issue in part being that the funding for those beds has been taken away so traditionally these days they go to jail instead (it's just not the correct disposition).
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