New Hampshire has been ranked the most “gun-owner friendly” state in the union and has even recently taken on a neighboring state over their restrictive gun laws. So, in a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” and as the candidate for governor from the Republican Party—the party that runs on a platform of freedom and is generally the most supportive of the Second Amendment—Kelly Ayotte may have surprised some when she said there is one area of gun law she would consider changing. During a Conversation with the Candidate event hosted by news channel WMUR 9, Ayotte said, “while she remains a firm supporter of the Second Amendment in New Hampshire… there is an area she is ‘concerned about’ regarding gun laws in the state,” the news channel reported in follow-up to the event.
Ayotte, a former U.S. senator, pointed specifically to mental health records and their lack of inclusion in the state’s firearm background check system. She noted that in some cases, individuals who have been deemed by a court as a danger to themselves or others are still able to legally purchase firearms because their mental health records are not part of the database used during background checks.
“I think we should fix that,” Ayotte said, signaling her willingness to address what she sees as a legislative loophole. She emphasized, however, that any changes must respect individual rights and not create disincentives for people seeking mental health treatment. Ayotte stressed that due-process protections would need to be a key part of any reform to ensure that individuals who are prohibited from owning a firearm could have the opportunity to regain that right through a legal process.
Ayotte’s comments come in the wake of the November 2023 shooting of former police chief Bradley Haas. Haas, who was working as a security guard at New Hampshire Hospital, was killed in an incident that raised concerns about gaps in the state’s gun laws. After the shooting, a News 9 investigation revealed that in many cases, critical information about individuals with severe mental health conditions is not being entered into the state’s background check system. The lack of a clear policy on what mental health records should be reported has led to significant oversights.
A bill aimed at closing this gap passed the state House of Representatives in March 2024. However, in May, the legislation stalled when the Republican-controlled state Senate voted to table the bill along party lines, delaying any immediate action on the issue.
Ayotte acknowledged the political complexities of the situation but expressed hope that the Legislature could come together to address the problem in a way that balances public safety with constitutional rights. “We need to protect our communities, but we also need to protect people’s freedoms,” she said.
As the 2024 gubernatorial race heats up, Ayotte’s stance on this issue could become a focal point, particularly in a state known for its strong gun rights culture. Though she has made it clear that she remains a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, her willingness to consider adjustments to mental health reporting could signal a more nuanced approach to gun policy under her potential governorship.
“I think we should fix that”
well, if you did, just about every left wing liberal would be excluded from firearms purchase.
😆
^^^^^^^Yes!!!^^^^^^&
My thoughts exactly.
I think if it is that important it should be brought before a judge and a defense attorney provided to advocate for the person who they are trying to database.
So if certain mental health issues make people too unsafe to have rights why leave them to walk among us? The very fact that this discussion exists is evidence the government at least ostensibly cares about the safety and well being of the many at the expense of the few. Shouldn’t they care enough to make sure that dangerous few who cannot be entrusted with rights are kept away from the many?
A person either is or is not dangerous.
A dangerous person should be locked up.
In other words: put up or shut up with your inconsistent, both-ways-having, trying to placate morons, little Eichmann bullshit.
Yes, it’s really that simple. Sadly, a significant portion of the population has been conditioned to be unfit for a free society. Liberty requires self-control and we’ve become a culture devoid of that.
I have NEVER met a mental health practitioner who was mentally healthy. That includes the 3 years I spent studying and being mentored in psychoanalysis. They are all looney tunes. A friend of mine has been in and out of all forms of counseling, psychotherapy, and psycho-pharmaceutical treatments….for 40 years. If the stories he tells are only 50% accurate, all of those folk who ‘treated’ him were incompetent and nutty as a Christmas fruit cake.
So, no….I do not want psycho-imbecillic buffoons spewing the psycho-medical jargon deciding who and who should not have a firearm.
I once watched a medical team electro- shock into oblivion the brain of one of my parishioners.
No…just no.
A former customer of ours was a retired psychology professor, taught at a nursing school after he bombed out of private practice. I used to enjoy chatting with him during car repair appointments, because he was very intelligent and could be engaging. Over a short time, I concluded that he was the most narcissistic person I’ve ever known, and eventually, according to his own definitions and comments used in our various conversations, he presented characteristics of psychopathy. By some measures, 7-8 out of a random 100 are psycho/socio, , so no surprise there from a statistical standpoint. He would never have seen any of it as applying to himself, however, which is one of the diagnostic points. Ironically, he even told me that he was convinced that many in his profession are there because they initially felt a compulsion to figure out their own problems.
Ayotte’s idea is a good one, and as a mental health practitioner, I would hope you would enlarge your research sample before you diagnose us all as “nuts.” Your method lacks validity.
My problem with this is how would this be enforced? There would be no doubt many MHP’s who would politically or emotionally react to this and with this bias infringe on a person’s 2A rights. How also could a mechanism be in place to discern a decision such as this? For example, I have seen many vets with PTSD and excluding one instance (suicidal) I would never sign off to deter their RKBA (a doctor would need to do this). Some actually choose to give their guns to friends (without my suggestion) until they feel more stable.
Each individual and their circumstances are unique. And more than one individual practitioner would be necessary to discern this. Then again we run into the possibility of bias by practitioners who have the mental health disease of leftism.
Being dangerous and deemed by the courts to be dangerous are two very different things.
That’s probably a terrible idea, but perhaps we could compromise: include background checks for voting, along with secure voting measures. Mental illness includes pretending that you’re something you aren’t, like identifying as any “gender” other than the one of two genders that corresponds to your biological sex.
This is an extremely important point. Transgenderism was listed as a mental disorder until the politics of the time shifted and it wasn’t. Who’s to say that something such as voting Republican wouldn’t be labelled as making you mentally defective? They already want to label people as terrorists for things that were main stream views a decade and a half or less ago, so why wouldn’t this be a thing too?
Give the state power at one’s own peril.
Trans people should be disqualified, they are suffering from a mental illness called body dysmorphic disorder. Those children in nashville would be alive if that tranny had no access to guns. Why would you argue against that?
I compare trans folks to computers. Specifically, they have PC architecture but somehow have Mac IOS loaded. There are 2, and only 2, ways to fix this. One is a hardware change to Mac architecture, but this would mean getting a whole new computer (by the way, this option is unavailable to organic bodies no matter how much they mutilate themselves). The other is a software change to a PC compatible version (therapy for the meat).
By the way, I refuse to accept someone for whom they pretend to be when they don’t even accept themselves for what they truly are.
“Transgenderism was listed as a mental disorder until the politics of the time shifted and it wasn’t.”
Transgenderism is still listed as a mental health disorder, its just called something else now in the DSM 5 and ‘conditionally’ spread across multiple mental health disorders to disguise it.
States are killing the privacy tenants of the medical records laws by having you sign something to obtain a gun or a permit to carry. No good will come of it.
We need a privacy law that no identifiable data can be collected, sold, or shared before everything collapses and social credit rules our lives.
Maybe try not being a mental defect and you can have a gun.
Every State should “Fix That!” There would be fewer shootings.
“Every State should “Fix That!” There would be fewer shootings.”
why is the fixation always on ‘shootings’ and never anything else?
There are far more criminal attacks with other non-firearm ‘weapons’, outnumbering firearms use 1,000:0.5
Every state should maybe fix people being so fooled by anti-gun BS into thinking guns are the only thing ever used in criminal attacks.
Across the United States daily:
~1,200 victims of criminal attacks daily very seriously injured, and some die, because they were attacked and beaten/kicked with hands/feet.
~1,800 victims of criminal attacks daily very seriously injured, and some die, because they were attacked and stabbed/slashed with a knife or some other sharpened/pointed ‘weapon’
~3,200 victims of criminal attacks daily very seriously injured, and some die, because they were attacked and beaten with a ‘blunt object’ weapon.
The two top weapons used in ~1,100 domestic abuse attacks daily are hand/feet and blunt objects then followed by other non-firearms weapons (e.g. sharpened/edged/pointed, ligatures, smothering, chemicals, hot/burning objects, drugs). On a scale of 1 – 10 with 10 being the least likely to be used guns are a 10.
In 2023 there were ~ 1,200 physical criminal attacks daily (mostly hands/feet and blunt objects used, less than 1% used a firearm or knife) upon victims where the attacker was a ‘member’ of the LGBTQ (and what ever follows that now) community (attacks include those carried out upon other members of the LGBTQ community). Victim injuries ranged in severity from none to death, ~63% of victims were very seriously injured, ~21% of victims died, the rest of the victims suffered minor to moderate injuries or no injury.
In 2023 there were ~ 1,600 physical criminal attacks daily (mostly hands/feet and blunt objects used, less than 1% used a firearm or knife) upon victims where the attacker was left wing (non-LGBTQ). Victim injuries ranged in severity from none to death, ~43% of victims were very seriously injured, ~18% of victims died, the rest of the victims suffered minor to moderate injuries or no injury. (~67% of these attackers were left wing liberal women)
In 2023 there were ~ 300 physical criminal attacks daily (mostly hands/feet and blunt objects used, less than 1% used a firearm or knife) upon victims where the attacker was right wing/conservative (non-LGBTQ). Victim injuries ranged in severity from non to death, ~23% of victims were very seriously injured, ~8% of victims died, the rest of the victims suffered minor to moderate injuries or no injury. (~43% of these attackers were right wing/conservative women)
In 2023 (into May 2024), 39% of the women attacked for purposes of sexual assault, were armed with a firearm and successfully employed DGU to defend against the attackers and escaped injury. Of the rest with no firearm, only 2% were able to escape and flee their attackers some with serious in injury but most with no injury, the rest were raped or otherwise seriously injured in the attack. The most used weapons used by the attackers to subdue their victims were hand/feet (and physical strength), knives, blunt objects, chemicals (e.g. pepper spray), less than 3% used a firearm.
Overall, the most frequently used weapons for criminal attack in 2023 were hand/feet, blunt objects, knives/axes/garden-tools
In a Free society with god-given “shall not be infringed” access to firearms it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep those guns because from dangerous individuals. They are dangerous and they REFUSE to follow any law that stops them from doing whatever it is they want to do -including buying guns illegally and using them illegally to do harm They don’t follow silly laws on the books.
Since it is impossible to keep the guns away from them any laws attempting to do so only infringe on the rights of the rest of us to keep and bear arms while doing absolutely zero good to actually stop the dangerous people. Accept that dangerous people will get guns anyhow unless those dangerous people are taken away from the guns and locked up in jails or institutions for the insane.
You can keep the dangerous people away from guns AND their victims by only locking up the dangerous people -not the guns.
Facts are most mass shooters obtained a gun legally rendering your point moot. This law along with prosecution of parents are good measures to prevent future shootings.
Them: “Aiee! Thats a scorpion, if he bites you, you will die!”
Me: “That’s not a scorpion. That’s a lizard.”
Them (2 females, in unison): “You’re crazy! God’s gonna get you! You’re gonna go to Hell!!!”
Me: “Huh?”
We were in nursery school. Yes, pre-k.
They went on to spawn a tribe of various govt workers.
Separately I will point out that a LOT of people believe that we cause an Apocalypse and destroy all life on Earth, The Messiah (Jesus, Allah, or Yahweh, depending) will come to take them to Heaven or Paradise or whatever…
Be careful what you wish for.
*if* we cause
“This law along with prosecution of parents are good measures to prevent future shootings.”
False logic. The law can not prevent such acts of violence, because it can not prevent a person from choosing to not follow the law. For example, we have laws against murder but murder still happens. Laws only work when people are willing to follow them, if a person chooses not to follow the law the law doesn’t ‘prevent’ them from violating the law if they choose to do so. This is actually the only ‘strength’ the law has, that there are people who will follow the law.
There are three types of so called ‘mass shooters’, and not necessarily ‘mass shooters’ but just ‘mass injury/killer’ which is really what a ‘mass shooter’ is’ (or in other words mass-injury/killing which can be my use of anything suitable thing to do so):
1. The criminal ‘crime as a business’ types. These are mostly criminal gangs, they mostly focus on inter-gang warfare and ‘hits’ and shootings during the commission of crimes where others are caught in the line of fire or cross fire and not the intended target. These types have an element of ‘depraved indifference’ associated.
2. The ‘depraved indifference’ types. These are not necessarily mentally ill driven but are more along the lines of purpose driven (usually to express some form of hatred) or ‘spree’ types simply because they want to. These tend to focus on a certain ‘victim objective’ such as age or gender or race or some other target of opportunity that meets their selective criteria. These types of mass-killers have probably been around the longest in human history, they are all through history some known for their infamy and some not so well known, for example Hitler who fixated on Jews mostly.
3. The mentally ill types. These are the ones like ‘school shooters’ and some ‘mass shooters’ in other public places. These are driven by a mental illness compulsion to harm/kill that breaks them down over time until they can no longer resist and then become driven completely by the mental illness condition to carry out their heinous crime. These are more along the lines of ‘spree killer’ but more location focused with lots of targets and are non-selective and and driven by mental illness with elements of seeking some type of recognition for ‘something’ and want to be ‘remembered’. These are also the most difficult to detect because they tend to hide it well until they are about to commit their heinous acts. These types also typically give some sort of warning from days to maybe minutes before their heinous acts. Its usually not clear what they are warning about and its sort of cryptic so its often (actually most times) not given much attention by others, but sometimes the warning can be more overt also even if not clearly defined. The ‘warning’ is sort of a last ditch effort to resist the mental illness compulsion, for example, Aiden Hale, the Nashville trans shooter, sent text messages and Ethan Crumbley, the Oxford shooter, wrote notes on his school work begging for help. There is an element of ‘depraved indifference’ here but its not the driving force motivation nor normally present absent the mental illness effects and is introduced by the mental illness.
The number one thing these three types share in common … if they do not have a gun or can’t buy one, they will steal or borrow one or get one from criminal elements, and failing that they will resort to other ‘weapons’ that can still, inflict ‘mass injury/death’. All three types have expressed this.
Well since Joyce Craig will take our guns and turn nh into north taxachusettes I’ll vote for Ayotte no matter what, just like I will vote for Trump no matter what. I also have no problem with this law, it is clear that the majority of mass shooters would be disqualified by such a law.