[NYAPRS Enews] Neville: People W/ Psych Disabilities Need Care, Not Fewer Rights

[Matt Canuteson]

NYAPRS Note: Governor Paterson has proposed legislation designed to
reduce gun violence. The proposed legislation intends to allow relevant
mental health records to be included in the National Instant Criminal
Background Check System, improves the use of the State's Combined
Ballistic Identification System (CoBIS), updates and clarifies the
State's gun licensing laws, and provides for increased security at gun
shops. The sharing of "relevant mental health records" has the potential
to infringe on the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and
therefore NYAPRS is continuing to closely follow this issue. We have
been using the expertise the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in
Washington DC to inform the legislature about potential rights issues
caused by this legislation. 

 

Letter to Albany Times Union

Mentally Ill Need Care, Not Fewer Rights  

Roy Neville   June 8, 2008

 

Your editorial ("Guns and New York," May 29) calling for state and
federal laws to ban handguns from mentally ill people who have been
involuntarily committed for mental health treatment is reactionary and
won't be effective as a deterrent to crime.

    

Mentally ill people commit only a small fraction of gun crimes, and
shouldn't be singled out and denied a freedom others enjoy.

 

The tough stances our pussycat legislators and Congress people really
need to take to keep these weapons from getting into the wrong hands is
to block sales of handguns and semiautomatic machine guns at open-market
sales events, to restrict sales of ammunition and to employ new
technology to mark cartridge casings, so they identify the gun used in a
shooting......

 

Advocates for mentally ill people also want improved police response to
people in a psychiatric crisis. And we want to see schizophrenic
patients get proper treatment. Better-trained police can make a big
difference; so too can better housing and community mental health care,
so these folks don't slip through the cracks.

 

ROY E. NEVILLE

National Alliance on Mental Illness 

Schenectady 

 

 

 

 

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