Suppose you’ve known a person for a long time and for a variety of reasons (various mental issues, interest in violence and gore etc.) think this person should not be owning a gun. They’ve informed you that they intend to apply for one. And they don’t have a criminal record or anything that would show up in a background check.
Is there any way you can contact relevant authorities and give them your assessment of this person’s mentality, or is that just not part of the process and can’t be done?
What’s the locale?
Doesn’t appear to have happened yet, any reason to suppose it will?
You don’t apply for a gun, you just go buy one. And no, unless you are willing to testify to criminal behavior on their part and have them arrested, there is not much you can do about it.
Unstable/Dangerous persons buy guns every day. Fortunately most of them don’t kill other people. The ones that do kill often commit suicide with them.
Unless there is a documented reason why they shouldn’t own a gun, such as a felony conviction or being institutionalized, there isn’t anything you can do to stop someone from legally buying a gun if they choose to. If you look at recent mass shootings I think virtually all of them bought their guns legally.
You need a license.
Could be that no one tried to stop them.
I think in some state you can express your concerns to the authorities and they’ll take him in for evaluations.
Is there any way you can contact relevant authorities and give them your assessment of this person’s mentality, or is that just not part of the process and can’t be done?
Can’t be done and that’s a good thing.
Flip it around…
Let’s pretend I’m your neighbor and I’ve been threatening you, so you decide to buy a gun for self-protection and when you go to get a gun, you find that you can’t because a “concerned citizen” (me) has made a complaint about your unstable state of mind. Is that how you think it should go?
The right to bear arms is a Constitutional right and treated as such in most of the U.S. You can’t generally have it infringed upon without due process and random complaints from others aren’t due process. They may start the process if there is sufficient legal justification to require some type of legal or medical intervention but they aren’t usually enough by themselves.
That said, I think a simple, justified complaint would work in some jurisdictions. I live in Massachusetts and while it isn’t nearly as difficult to get a gun here legally as some believe, it requires approval from the local police chief and they vary a lot in their attitudes towards individual gun ownership with some simply giving them a rubber stamp while others require proof of an extraordinary need to have one. The constitutionality of that requirement has been called into question many times but it would usually cover your scenario. If you knew that the person in question was applying for a gun license, you could just call the police chief and make your concerns known. That would probably work in most cases.
Again, the same types of requirements do not exist in most states. The requirement for a “gun license” is itself fairly unusual. Some states have them at least for handguns but they are far from universal.
No, you don’t, in most places in the United States.
Federal law requires a background check for guns purchased through a Federal Firearms Licensee (“gun dealer”) regardless of the point of transaction. No check is required for private sales, regardless of the point of transaction.
Some states have stricter laws. But in the last for states in which I lived (Ohio, Michigan, Wyoming, and Louisiana) no “license” was required to purchase a firearm.
To answer the original question: Sorry, this is still America, and we have a thing called “due process”. We (mostly) don’t suspend constitutional rights without a trial. There are specific things that cause a person to become a “prohibited person” when it comes to buying weapons. If the seller knows, or should have known, that the potential buyer was a prohibited person, he’s not allowed to legally make the transaction. The things you listed don’t meet those criteria.
Here they are:
convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
who is a fugitive from justice;
who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
who is an illegal alien;
who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner; or
who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.You are greatly misinformed about gun laws. Only a few states require a license simply to buy a gun.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Correction:
In at least Massachusetts, it seems you do need a license to own or carry a gun.
That varies, depending upon your state of residence. Missouri has no licensing requirements. Most don’t, for that matter. Illinois, right next door, does. Sort of. They have a “F.O.I.D.,” or Firearm Owners IDentification card, renewable every several years, much like a driver’s license. The F.O.I.D. is not a picture-ID; it’s typically used in conjunction with a state-issued driver’s license, which is.
A F.O.I.D. is required in the state of Illinois for firearms purchases, as well as ammo too, I think. I do not know if non-residents (say, a Missourian come across the river to a gun show, or shopping at an Illinois gun store) are even able to buy a firearm in Illinois. I have purchased ammunition in Illinois w/o a F.O.I.D.; my Missouri driver’s license has sufficed.
I know for fact that the Cabela’s here in the St. Louis area will ask Illinois residents to provide their F.O.I.D. when purchasing firearms (“long guns” only). Since Cabela’s is a nationwide chain, they tend to be fairly cautious/conservative about following Federal and State laws and regulations, often erring on the side of caution, if anything.
Remember, Federal Law prohibits buying handguns across state lines (that’s for ordinary citizens; FFL Dealers and law enforcement agencies are exempt from this, IIRC), and that’s the benchmark, so no individual State can contradict that, although States may be tougher wrt “long guns” (rifles and shotguns).
You need a carry permit, but if you don’t have one, you just need to transport your gun disassembled in Indiana. The advice was “and in a box, in your trunk.” Or, at least back when I bought one for target shooting (that I don’t have anymore because I have a child in the house), that was the law.
Some gun dealers who have ranges will sell you a gun and rent you a locker, so you can keep your gun there and come to the range, get your gun, shoot, and put it back in the locker. The ones I saw were behind the counter, and you had to show ID, and an employee got your gun for you.
In Indiana, when I got a carry permit, I was asked whether I’d ever been under the care of a psychiatrist, or been diagnosed with a mental illness. I was told that it wasn’t an automatic denial, but that you needed a letter from your shrink saying you weren’t a danger to yourself or others, and it had to be signed off by the sheriff or police chief, or someone (I don’t remember the details-- I didn’t need this, so I didn’t pay that much attention).
If someone has lied on this form to obtain a carry permit, they have committed fraud, which is some kind of crime, but I don’t know how serious. However, someone actually carrying with a fraudulently obtained permit is committing a more serious offense. I’m pretty sure that, at a minimum, the gun can be confiscated. If you know someone who has lied, you can report them, but I don’t know how much of a priority it will be for the police. We’ve actually had a rash of shootings in Indianapolis, and several are unsolved, so maybe it would be taken seriously. I have no idea.
How any of this applies to hunting, weapons used for hunting, and hunting licenses, I don’t know. It’s just for handguns.
In Michigan, to buy a handgun, I had to go to the police and apply for a license (including passing a written gun safety test), which took several days to get and had to be notarized, and then had only ten days validity after I got it. Then, after buying the handgun, it has to be taken in to a police station for a safety inspection within ten days. No such license is required to buy a long gun.
If you have something really solid about mental issues you could contact the local police and hope they take it seriously. But I don’t think there’s much they can do unless you can provide them information that is worthy of an investigation. If they haven’t made threats or expressed an interest in committing a crime I don’t know if the police can do anything. Possibly they could contact local gun shops, gun dealers aren’t required to sell to anybody, I assume some of them must be decent enough to be cautious about such a person. Or am I giving them too much credit?
Speaking strictly IME: generally yes, you are giving them too much credit. I have known a few who might decline a sale if something seemed “off” about a buyer, but overall, and again, just IME, most gun dealers would sell a gun to anyone who could still pass the NICS background check, no matter how sketchy they appear or act.
Big box retailers like Cabela’s, Bass Pro, Gander Mountain, etc., are waaaay more cautious.
^Depends on the manner of weirdness I guess…
I have known gun owners who have turned down customers who clearly had no idea what they were doing. In at least one case, the customer was later arrested as an Islamic terrorist.
But you have to think about it this way… What if some random person just started dialing up the police or the courts and tried to blacklist everyone who picked on them in high school or something? This is why mental health has to be adjudicated and there must be due process before someone can be stripped of their rights.