“We’re only trying to target those who may unfortunately want to commit suicide and who may murder their spouse who’s in the house, their children who’re in the house or their roommate.” – Oregon Senator Brian Boquist in Gun surrender bill intended to prevent suicide moves forward [via oregonlive.com]
Because of course the would-be murder-suicider can’t use a common kitchen knife or poison.
Exactly this … beat me to it!
Laugh it up, fuzzball. Will it still be funny when men with guns kick down your door to confiscate your guns? Any given day, we’re X number a madman spree shootings and X number of House, Senate, or SC votes away from losing our guns in a a post-incident emotional tsunami.
Time is not on our side; the demographics of the country are changing. It’s time that the POTG get off their high horse and get serious about legally removing psychos from society.
Yes, yes, yes, due process this and potential for abuse that. I get it. That’s life in the big city. Let’s write some bills that pass constitutional muster: one that puts the onus on the system to demonstrate someone’s unfitness, one that defines and punishes with civil and criminal penalties attempts to abuse the system.
Let’s get out in front of the issue. Instead of making glib remarks and forfeiting the action to statists exploiting it as a pretext for civilian disarmament, we should get involved in removing clear and present dangers from our midst.
“If they can’t be trusted with a gun, then they can’t be trusted [without a guardian] or [to walk the streets] or [insert glib remark here]. Exactly. So let’s get them off the streets. “Pre-crime much?”, they say. Well.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that 95% of spree shooters were known, sometimes diagnosed or even adjudicated, as being crazy (to use a layman’s term) beforehand. We know who the worst people are in terms of mental instability and the threats they pose.
Let’s address them up front, where the evidence of their devolution is clear, and quit allowing statists to hijack a proper function for their immoral purpose. The alternative is to snark ourselves into disarmament. Sitting around waiting for the violent crazies to erupt is not a serious plan. We can do better.
I’m with you on most of this, but there is no time when people (especially of the anti-gun variety) will stop trying to hijack government for their own authoritarian meddling.
What this guy should have said: “We’re not trying to destroy due process and civil rights, it’s just the natural end effect of everything we do.”
“Sitting around waiting for the violent crazies to erupt is not a serious plan. We can do better.”
I agree. We have a serious problem with mental health in this country. When someone is too crazy to take care of themselves, we don’t do anything unless they commit a criminal act. That’s a problem. It should be much easier for family to gain permanent guardianship over someone like that, Even if they get back on their meds for a short time.
The solution to someone known to be either suicidal or homicidal is not to take their guns away and pat yourself on the back. If they’re intent on harm, the will cause harm. If they are intent on causing harm with a firearm, they will by either using the firearm when someone shows up to take their guns or by getting guns illegally. For example, the Sandy Hook killer killed his mom and stole her guns.
TX, you have a point. Twice when I was in college there was someone who was suicidal and people responded by taking away their guns without permission. In one case the guy didn’t know who had taken his guns so he grabbed the big square butcher’s knife from the house kitchen and started threatening everyone in sight; in the other he decided if they wouldn’t let him off himself with his own guns he’d take out the whole danged place with explosives. In the first case others tackled the guy before he seriously hurt anyone; in the second it came darned close to blowing up a house with thirty guys in it.
Taking away guns is like putting makeup on measles: it makes some people looking at the situation feel better, but actually risks making things a lot worse.
Guns make it a hell of a lot easier and appealing to do both.
So do knives, cars, poison, fists, feet, rope, plastic bags, bombs, hit men, frying pans, syringes, etc, etc. There are plenty of ways to murder or commit suicide just easy as a gun. Let’s quite blaming a misused tool for the abhorrent behavior of crazy people.
But guns are the best tool for murder and suicide. Or are you telling me we should start equipping our military with knives and ropes. I think the orders of protection are B.S. but when your argument is that taking away the best tool for the job will not help, you are lying to yourself and everyone else.
The problem is that the argument against this BS is a lot more intellectual. The right to keep and bear arms is an extremely important and fundamental right and should not be removed with a perceived increase in the risk to self or others. It should only be removed as a result of actions that would result in direct court supervision and once judgment has been given by said court.
So why is our suicide rate lower than countries like Japan that have far less firearms and almost no access to them?
Oh, you mean PEOPLE are the problem? Shocking!
God forbid we do anything like address mental health in the US.
Go live in a society like Japan and see where your suicide rate is going to be. Cast systems when status is everything will produce results like that
In a word, bullshit.
Pre-crime, much?
BTW, to all the Bob Owen’s out there saying what SA & RRA did to support anti-gun politicians is “how power works” and “that’s how the political game is played” disgust me b/c it’s my rights at risk of being taken away.
Playing the dirty game of politics is a losers game.
If you sacrifice your principles for currying favor, you won’t really receive it and deserve none of it.
I hereby declare today Turd’s RRA and SA Internet outrage day. You know, the big Turd boycott thing.
LOL put the turd on the table
“These lawyers and men of learning and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be managers of this Constitution and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow all us little folks like the great Leviathan; yes just as the whale swallowed up Jonah.”
~Amos Singletary
That’s exactly what we have as our political class today.
It won’t establish a precedent. Besides, we did this last year already.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being ruled by your inferiors.
Boquist is a Republican, the only Republican to vote for this bill. Interesting. Apparently, he is attempting to prevent veteran suicides, which have occurred with three people close to him. The Democrats of course love the bill. Elections have consequences.
How to prevent veteran suicides.
1) Don’t send idealistic young lovers of liberty into third world holes
2) When collateral damage happens don’t treat it like it’s no big deal that innocent children died because of US intervention.
Provide actual resources for them, without fear of entrapment or retribution, to get the help they need.
^ That. Right there.
Send Congresses (both state and federal) to third-world hellholes first. Let McCain & Miss Lindsey lead them.
Only after ALL politicians have made their ultimate sacrifice for their vitally important third-world hellhole should any non-politicians be deployed.
Regular military is to be reserved exclusively for defense of direct attacks against the US.
What he said. Our military should be for the defense of the country. Kudos to those that serve and go where they are told, but it is bot right for the US to be offensive in war.
That extreme mindset led us to sit on our hands throughout the 1930s, resulting in more than a few U.S. casualties in WWII in the 1940s.
I’m not authorizing a blank check for interventions everywhere, just where our interests require our action. I’ll even concede that many military actions of the past half century were unworthy of our involvement. Still, others were. The key is knowing which is which, not in withdrawing to Fortress North America, where we think we’re safe from all attacks.
Well, McCain has spent a fair bit of time in one of those hellholes.
Granted, it was an unplanned visit, and he got there by being shot out of an airplane, and some of his neocommunist political views make it look like he’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome…
Unclear missions and difficult Rules of Engagement make people second guess themselves a lot. Sometimes, second guessing and self-imposed guilt leads to suicide.
Fighting insurgencies involves convoluted ROEs. For example: 12 year old laying IED. Do you kill the kid? is he a combatant? Is he doing it for money? Will not killing the IED emplacer result in Coalition Forces getting killed? There are no good answers, only stress to deal with after the deployment. Some deal with it by drinking liquor, some drink lead
Nothing prevents veteran suicide like the following message.
“If you are feeling down and you talk to your anti gun family, the state will come take your property without your permission. You needn’t even be at the hearing.”
Can you not see a possibility of closing down communication between people going through rough times and their families? Why would I talk to someone about severe life stress if the result is cops coming to my house to take my property?!?!
If everyone around Boquist is killing themselves, shouldn’t he be looked at as a potential causative factor?
Maybe a PFB (protection from Boquist) 300 yard exclusion zone order should be established for all depressed Oregonians.
Give him a hardhat with a flashing yellow strobe and OSHA back-up horn to warn of his approach.
I get creeped out just looking at him and I’m thousands of miles away.
So i looked up his bio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Boquist
Seems this former Army Lt.Col made a living selling war simulators to the DoD. One of his kids went into the Navy and killed himself.
So now he wants to translate his problem into some action that will everyone else.
Sounds like sudden Brady syndrome.
And to think. All he would have had to do to save his son would be to have scheduled a hearing, spread his son’s problems around a court room and have cops sent to take his son’s property. Sounds super helpful to me.
“If an order is issued, that person would have to surrender his or her deadly weapons within 24 hours to a law enforcement officer, gun dealer or third party.”
1. What is a deadly weapon?
2. Think of all the damage that could be done in 24 hours!
3. How do they verify compliance?
Are they going to take all the steak knives and bleach from the house as well? Rip out the electrical sockets and the bathtub? Confiscate rope and razor blades? Drive off in the poor sap’s car? No? Then I guess only guns are the deadly weapon in question.
From Oregon State Legislature HB719:
(1) “Deadly weapon” means:
(a) Any instrument, article or substance specifically designed for and presently capable
of causing death or serious physical injury; or
(b) A firearm, whether loaded or unloaded.
So a firearm is specifically designed for AND presently capable of causing death or serious physical injury?
But a knife is not? Do not all potentially deadly weapons have other lawful and good uses?
And if it’s winter, someone will have to remove all the icicles from the eaves. If it stays cold, they’ll have to post someone at the house to remove any icicles that get longer than 4 inches.
So they’re going to serve an emotionally unstable person, someone they suspect may be suicidal/homicidal, a paper telling him he’s (or she’s) got 24 hours to hand over his weapons and then what? Send him off? Tell him to have a nice day? Isn’t it possible that the act of serving him the notice could give him the push he needs to go ahead and go through with it?
Exactamundo! Isn’t this the polar opposite of waiting (cooling off) periods to purchase? Hurry up and git er done.
I’d like to know who decides that I’m a potential suicide risk?
Sounds like this could apply to anyone. Come and take my firearms and then I have to prove that I’m not contemplating suicide.
Good luck getting my stuff back.
If anyone has ever seen a shrink or simply been prescribed antidepressants by their GP they’ve already marked themselves as “mentally ill” in the eyes of the authorities
Medical records are forever.
Well said, Governor. Those who promulgate such inane “feel good” legislation should be subjected to the “unintended consequences” of their actions. Let THEM be the ones who have to don SWAT gear and face death or grievous wounds instead of the police and then see how much nonsense like this passes legislative muster.
You missed an important question
0) Who determines you are a dangerous person and what process is there to verify these statements are true?
1) that’s the whole point, this would allow them to eventually confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon, for your own protection of course….
2) Exactly, the government isn’t known for its speed
3) Why do we need to verify compliance? It’s essentially a government aid program if it fails it will be one of the many failures that is just swept under the rug. And besides if the guns go missing do you really expect a left leaning state to open an investigation to recover them? Who verifies that DFACS isn’t losing children cause that happens quite often
The 9 scariest words in the English language, I’m from the government and I’m here to help
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think I read that somewhere.
You’re assuming these opponents of civil rights have good intentions?
Some of them do. Kind of a mixed bag of the misguided and the malicious.
The government should make suicide pill available to people over 21 who want them. If someone wants to commit suicide, let them. Sometimes life dishes out more than a person can handle and they’ve had enough of it. People who never have any real problems don’t understand that a life under extreme stress can be brutal.
“People who never have any real problems…”
I’ve never met any of those people!
Agreed. Personally I believe that the decision to end one’s own life is about the most fundamental right. If government denies that of people, by whatever means they choose, then are you much more than a slave to the state?
Does Oregon have a registry of all “deadly weapons”? What about those dastardly boating accidents?
I don’t know if it is my inner paranoia, or do all these state laws seem to have a cookie cutter approach and feel? Like they are coming the same source. To what benefit?. Do they decide after these get passed in 40 or 50 states, does the mask come off and they decide that all gun owners are dangerous or suicidal and we need to take away all arms by fiat?
Yes to same source, or at least one of only two sources. The bills’ authors will be found somewhere between the legislators and either Bloomberg or Soros.
The legislation is part of a 20 state initiative from Prosecutors Against Gun Violence (PAGV), American State Legislators for Gun Violence Prevention (ASLGVP), and the Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence. They issued a press release on it last month:
http://manhattanda.org/node/6441/
Oregon Pre-Crime division
The ultimate god given right is to choose the time, place and method of your death. Self defense is a subset of that right. Legislating suicide prevention is an abomination in and of itself.
Its also nice of the state to pass a law that will encourage violence against women. Since most of these restraining orders will be nuisance cases during divorce proceedings. Fake Rape, Fake Hate, Fake Domestic Violence.
Just read the entire text. This is some very scary shit!
It’s damned scary, a tip about a dangerous person will result in confiscation of all deadly weapons until the government deems you to be no longer a threat. Im sure that clean diagnosis can only be administered from doctors approved by the very government that confiscated your weapons without due process of law
Give satan’s kid a hammer. . .
This sounds like Stalin had used during the Purge. Create a trumped up charge to denied due process of the accused.
Let prevent crime by taking away the rights of everyone. Except for the State and a few people.
Why don’t we go back to the time where a spouse could send you to the funny farm on an involuntary commitment and keep you there while they could play and spend your money?
Wasn’t the term, “put her on a shelf” used for this?
Why would you use a gun to murder your spouse when you can strangle them with your bare hands? That’s like going to the super bowl and watching the game on the tv in the stadium bar with the $20 beers.
Extreme protection order on tyrannical idiots in POS states.
F OR
and WA.
and CA
and major sections of ID
And the Federal Income Tax passed as a 1% tax on the richest 1% of the country.
Left unsaid, “for now”
How is this constitutional?!?! No due process. This is idiotic. Great way to just shut down anyone down who is struggling and whom might have talked to someone about their depression or anxiety for help – now – many people will keep their struggles internal and try to deal with it alone. Way to go libs! I wouldn’t be surprised if suicides go up after this bill is implemented since people will not look for help now for fear of their rightful property being taken from them unconstitutionally.
And I agree with many of the other posters here – the 24 hour time limit – a lot can happen in 24 hours. Sheesh, morons are in control.
Uh… would-be murderers and suicidal people don’t typically listen to or abide by orders or laws… or didn’t you know?
The bill authors only care about firearm confiscation. The legislation would disarm a person because they are a danger to themselves or others, but doesn’t require a mental health evaluation or treatment to address the danger.
It’s all about the guns, all the guns, and nothing but the guns.
Yep.
As we have seen repeatedly in Europe, a truck or car can do as much if not more damage than a civilian firearm.
Not confiscating them, are they? Telling.
Well, they’re being partially honest. They’re just leaving out the part about how liberals think everyone who has a gun is a potential murderer / suicide risk.
The amount of evidence required to take away someone’s RKBA should be the same as would put them in jail. These laws are designed to remove that burden of proof, and are unconstitutional.
It’s worse than that. Oregon law requires “clear and convincing evidence” for an involuntary mental health confinement. This bill only requires a “preponderance of the evidence” to require surrender of firearms.
If they are pulling the guns, they should at least put the person under 72 hour observation.
You guys need to think outside the box on this. The first people subjected to this will not be unstable murderers or people considering suicide. The first group of people to use this will be divorce attorneys. Right after they accuse their soon to be ex-spouse of domestic violence and sexually molesting their children.
An opening salvo trifecta. Try going into divorce court with this hanging in over your head. Ever hear of “leverage” in negotiations?
As a demonstration of this proposed law, a test case should be established.
I hereby nominate Kim Jong Un to be the lab rat.
Let’s send the entire Oregon Legislature over to Korea so they can show everybody how it should be done.
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