PTSD Diagnosis versus Right to Bear Arms
For my blog post, I have chosen to take a stand on a topic. For those who know me, you can now collectively say “Figures…”
I have opinions, and while they are not always right, I can always make them sound as though they are.
First and foremost, I would not take a stand on a topic which does not personally affect me. I must feel as though I have a right to an opinion in the matter, or else I would have to ask myself “who are you advocating for?”
My topic is the notion of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) potentially providing medical information in violation of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) laws to other federal agencies in order to compile a list of Veterans suffering from mental health issues, and especially Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), so that these other agencies can then confiscate our privately owned firearms, in violation of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (part of the Bill of Rights, or the first 10 amendments), or the right to bear arms. My opinion is that this would also violate the 4th Amendment as an unreasonable search and seizure. If no crime has been committed, the government would in essence be attempting to thwart future possible crimes, which is frighteningly similar to Orwell’s novel entitled 1984, where the notion of Thought Police was first introduced.
This has NOT occurred yet, but it seems to be something that is constantly buzzing in the background, like so much white noise, just enough to make Veterans like myself nervous.
First of all, not all PTSD sufferers are Veterans. So, discriminating against Veterans by only capturing Veterans suffering from PTSD, as opposed to the entire population suffering from PTSD, is actionable under Equal Opportunity laws to begin with. In this case, it would be discrimination against a protected class, or disabled persons, as well as all of the other laws that discriminating against disabled persons violates.
That being said, many Veterans ARE PTSD sufferers. And there are certainly ranges of this disease to the extent that one cookie-cutter image cannot be presented as “all” sufferers. Depending upon the individual, their support system, and their circumstances, there are highly functioning Veteran PTSD sufferers, and poorly functioning ones as well. Now that America has finally broken the silence regarding PTSD, a notion brought forward by Bessel Van der Kolk (2014) in the New York Times Bestseller book entitled The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (p.234), and many positive inroads have been laid recently towards providing treatment for this ancient, yet previously secretive disease which is a bedfellow of combat and war, it would be a shame to penalize Veterans who have to muster a great deal of courage just to come out and admit that they may have been adversely affected by witnessing and causing and receiving unspeakable acts of horror on the battlefields that the U.S. government has chosen them to serve on.
Second, not all PTSD sufferers are a danger to themselves or others. In fact, most aren’t. Of course, when a PTSD suffering Veteran harms others, that’s the news story we remember. What is not newsworthy is the thousands of PTSD suffering Veterans who do not do anything to get on the news for each one who does. It’s sort of like plane crashes. We hear about planes crashing, and we remember that, but for every crash, there are literally millions of flights that land perfectly safely, that we never hear about because that’s not newsworthy. We tend to hear about and remember the sensational, and then it’s not much of a leap before people start indicating that these rarities are actually the norm. You’d think that many planes crash. Or that many Veterans go nuts and shoot up a work site. They say it only takes one bad apple to ruin the bunch. But I disagree. One bad apple amongst a barrel full of good apples does not make a barrel full of bad apples. It remains a barrel full of good apples with one bad one. To indicate anything else is a lie.
Third, I suffer from PTSD, and I am not a danger to anyone who isn’t trying to seriously harm others. If somebody is trying to seriously harm others, I can and will be very dangerous. With or without my legally owned firearms.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, punishing Veterans with PTSD by taking away their rights is counterintuitive, because they volunteered to go and give of themselves, up to and including their lives and their sanity, so that the rest of the nation could continue to enjoy their democracy. So, they go to war, get traumatized, end up with a debilitating disease, and the same government that they served turns around and steals their private arms in violation of the Constitution? I can think of few things as egregious…
There is a camp in the arms arena which seems incredibly logical to me. IF the government takes the guns away from “good guys”, the bad guys will still get the guns they need/want, so the only thing they are doing, in essence, is removing people’s ability to defend themselves. A black market will appear, of which only criminals will exploit, further arming bad guys and further causing good guys to be more outgunned.
One might be tempted to quote statistics from countries where guns have been outlawed. The fatal flaw with this being used as a catalyst towards de-arming Americans is that it is much, much too late to try and do that. Unless law enforcement is willing to enter every American home and tear it apart like is sometimes done during search warrant raids, requiring people to turn in their guns may yield a slim percentage of the gun owners in America actually complying with such an order.
Back to the U.S. Constitution. While the Constitution (U.S. Const. art. I, § 8) allows the forming of militias, to wit: “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress”, and the aforementioned right to bear arms, many Americans misunderstood why these were written into the contract. A lot of people believe these rights are there to allow citizenry to protect themselves from foreign enemies. The Constitution indicates their mission is “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” SUPPRESS INSURRECTIONS. Key words. These were actually included to allow U.S. Citizens to protect themselves against the U.S. government, should the government ever turn into a dictatorship akin to the one we left during our revolution. History has a funny way of repeating itself, and the founding fathers, having just spilled blood with England in order to leave behind a tyrannical foreign leader, were rightfully afraid that down the line, what’s to stop the U.S. from turning into its own tyrannical country? And if it does, the authors of our Constitution wrote into the script the ability of the nation’s people to bear arms, form militias, and overthrow the U.S. government should it come down to that. So, the notion of the U.S. government forcefully removing arms from any population groups seems like a very good first step towards that tyrannical government that we are supposed to be able to overthrow.
As has become a common phrase, but a truism to many of us warrior-poet gun owners, they can have my guns when they pry them from my cold, dead hands. (And even then, I will resist!)
As an afterword of reasonableness, I do understand that there are some mental health diseases that would make a sufferer dangerous to themselves and others, especially more so if they were armed. And for those SPECIFIC cases, I support ensuring, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, and only with certain diagnoses, that all sufferers therein be prevented, as much as is legally possible, to own weapons. My cautionary statement is that the U.S. government paint with fine brushstrokes here, not broad ones.
And while I am certainly not endorsing or advertising for them, I found a law firm who specializes in this very issue – Veterans having their arms confiscated. A direct quote from Mr. Berry is very inciteful into this issue: “There are also prohibitions against owning a gun under certain conditions as laid forth in 18 U.S.C. § 922, such as that the applicant “has not been adjudicated as a mental defective or been committed to a mental institution,” but there is not a direct prohibition against ownership simply on the grounds of having a mental health diagnosis.” (I emboldened part of that for effect – Mr. Berry didn’t…). Having not realized this firm existed before this research, I may just need to call them for some help with my ongoing feud with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and their Pension and Compensation (P&C) branch, who (horrifically) adjudicate Veterans’ disability compensation claims…
Please take a side on this subject, and do not make Veterans regret the great sacrifices they made to ensure that ALL Americans, including THEMSELVES, are forever granted the rights created through our Constitution.
References:
Berry Law Firm – Veterans Law Attorneys. (2017, December 1). Mental health: PTSD veterans gun ownership. Berry Law Firm website [HTML]. Retrieved from https://ptsdlawyers.com/blog/can-veteran-ptsd-gun/
Office for Civil Rights (OCR). (2013, July 26). HHS.gov health information privacy: Summary of the HIPAA security rule. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services website [HTML]. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/laws-regulations/index.html
U.S. Const. art. I, § 8. Retrieved from https://usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Viking.