I was diagnosed manic-depressive (now retitled “bipolar disorder”) in 1980 and paranoid schizophrenic in 1982. On neither occasion was I any more dangerous than you are, with or without a firearm.
I’m certainly not a public safety risk now. You could make Long Island a significantly safer locale by requiring that everyone with a gun place them in my hands for safekeeping.
Am I an outlier (or for that matter just a liar)? Are you inclined to think that it would still be better if people with a psychiatric track record were denied the right to bear arms, regardless of my above claims?
Treating people differently with regards to rights and liberties and social privileges should always be a highly questionable policy. There should be a compelling public benefit to doing so sufficient to outweigh people’s right to be treated on the same basis as their neighbor.
Most people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis are not dangerous by any estimate — they have no history of violence or threats, their own psychiatrists don’t consider them dangerous of potentially inclined to do violence by reasons of psychotic delusional-thinking processes, psychotic emotional-instability processes, or plain old ordinary nonpsychotic belligerent short-temper antisocial sorts of processes.
Most people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis are far more likely to be the victims of violence. In fact there is now significant evidence that the precipitating cause of people being eventually given a psychiatric diagnosis is their victimization at the hands of other people. (I’m willing to go dig up cites if requested but you should be able to establish the veracity of this claim on your own, with no possibility of cherry-picking on my part, with Google and a few moments’ research).
Even people who have both a psychiatric diagnosis and the opinion of their psychiatrists that they are dangerous are not solidly and reliably more likely to commit violent acts than the rest of you are. (Or, to restate, psychiatrists have a pretty abysmal success rate when it comes to predicting dangerousness).
Things you should contemplate while considering the issue:
• You don’t pick up the local paper and read that the branch manager of Citibank who has increased the investments to lower middleclass homeowners is a paranoid schizophrenic. Not because he isn’t but because that information isn’t generally made available nor, even if the newspaper learns of it, is it considered appropriate material to print about him. You do, however, read about any psychiatric history of anyone who does commit violent acts, because then it is considered relevant by the newspapers.
• There’s no way to “keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill” without centralizing medical records, as is already pointed out above, and not merely centralizing them “for medical use only” but making them available to societal organizations to comb through and make decisions to restrict people’s liberties. I don’t want to overstate a “slippery slope” but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that it might not be confined to psychiatric medical histories. Think about drug use and histories of addiction, or HIV status, or the use of medications that occasionally have certain cognitive side effects.
• I am not a 2nd Amendment hating gun control fanatic by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m also not sporting “I’m the NRA and I vote” buttons, and I can see the cynical side of political expediency at work here. Someone shoots up a bunch of people, you get two main reactions: ban the guns and end this gun violence; and lock up the loonies and end this craziness. The latter is a refrain that is often embraced by people who don’t much care for the “ban the gun” reaction. You don’t need to be a gun-control advocate to see that that’s true. Religious fundamentalists with connections to ISIS who use automatic weapons won’t be curtailed by laws designed to restrict handguns from law-abiding citizens, I can see that quite clearly, but that doesn’t mean some pro-NRA types are not loudly shouting about locking up the psycho nutcases who have mental health diagnoses.