By Victoria Wicks
A bill to suspend gun rights of certain mentally ill people was killed in committee Wednesday. Proponents say potentially violent and mentally ill people should be added to the federal background check list of those who can’t legally buy or own guns. But bill opponents say mentally ill people should receive treatment and should not be subjected to restrictions on their constitutional rights.
Yankton attorney David Hosmer represents mentally ill clients, but he supports taking gun rights away from involuntarily committed people who pose a threat to others. Hosmer tells the House Human Services Committee that there are extensive due-process protections before gun rights are suspended. And he says the state can keep control over gun rights by acting before the federal government steps in: “If we don’t get in front of this and state an opinion as it relates to how we want people to be treated in South Dakota, then I can guarantee you that sometime down the road, in my estimation, the United States government will mandate at some point that we have to report all people with psychiatric disorders.”
Currently, mental illness is not on the state’s list of conditions that prevent purchase or ownership of guns. That is as it should be, according to Phyllis Arends. She’s executive director of the South Dakota chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “By focusing on this, you are discouraging people from seeking treatment,” she says, “because if they do not get a mental illness diagnosis, they can buy a gun.”
Arends says financial resources should go to treatment of disorders rather than to this proposal. This bill, however, does not require any funding.
Representative Melissa Magstadt says the bill reaches too far. “We are asking a new role of a non-elected board to move from treatment access to being … the instigator of restrictions on constitutional rights. That makes me a little uncomfortable,” Magstadt says.
But fellow committee member Karen Soli says the legislature that currently is considering arming school personnel needs to flesh out that plan: “We don’t want our first response to this violence just to be let’s get some more guns. We want to do something that actually is meaningful.”
A vote to pass House Bill 1188 ended in a tie. A subsequent motion to kill the bill succeeded.