Rather sad memory. In 1997 my father desperately needed help. But he was totally noncoöperative. So we had to have him involuntarily committed (to a nice, private mental hospital). Yeah, he’d been bipolar all his adult life. But everything came to a climax when my mother died in 1996, and he couldn’t handle things anymore. That at least is the short story.
Anyway, after his case was finally adjudicated (to use a big word) in 1997, he certainly could never buy a gun again. And my understanding is that held true for anywhere he went in the United States.
Yet he clearly didn’t have to ‘register’ as a sufferer of mental illness anywhere he went. And I assume his records were open for all to see.
So why do sex offenders have to ‘register’?
(Quick reminder: this is a factual legal question. Please don’t turn it into a debate about the sex offender registry .)
The idea is that they might re-offend, so the neighborhood needs to know. As for the specific law, I don’t know. (sorry, I thought this was GD at first)
Sex offenders have to regularly check in and keep an updated address. They are usually restricted from going to certain places (such as schools where minors will be found) or doing certain things (like coach little league, for the same reason). There’s also a searchable database. So it imposes much more onerous obligations than somebody with a mental health diagnosis, and maintaining a registry assists the government with this oversight.
Simple answer: People convicted of certain offenses have to register as sex offenders because it’s the law.
California had the first sexual offender registry law way back in 1947, but it did not require those registrations be made public. It wasn’t until the 90’s that more states enacted laws requiring sex offender registration and that they be made available to the public. Then, in 1994 (Jacob Wetterling) and 1996 (Megan Kanka) high profile sexual assaults and murders and their subsequent outcries led to the federal government to require states to create sex offender registries and make them public.
From what I could gather, the original CA law was meant as a tool for the police in investigations into new crimes. But it was the (highly overstated) public’s panic over “stranger danger” and the media’s fanning of those flames that brought about the massive expansion of the laws.
I will note that there is some debate (and evidence available on both sides) into whether sexual offenders are more likely to recidivate than other criminals, as well as if these registration laws actually accomplish anything positive and if that positive is greatly outweighed by the costs of the programs. But that’s for Great Debates.
Simple answer - the sex offender registry was created to track people who had demonstrated (by repeat offenses or the nature of their first crime) they were likely to re-offend, and often violently.
The debate we really don’t want to get into, but have to mention, is that the impetus then was to expanding it to include many and all crimes involving sex, even if there was little evidence such behaviour might repeat.
I have to wonder with your father, since I don’t know US gun law that well - are there background checks every state? How does, say, Alabama know that he was committed in Iowa or Florida, or would that be because of an available criminal record? (Do records never get expunged with time?) So if you’d managed to commit him before he got the attention of the court system, he’d be able to buy a gun?
Also, to put it bluntly - nobody worries about the guy next door with the nervous breakdown, especially if he can’t buy a gun. Whereas most people would like to know if a violent sex offender or child molester has moved into the neighbourhood. So it the first case, it’s only a matter for the police and firearms license folk, for the latter it’s allegedly everyone’s business. (Or would be, if everyone on the list were violent and/or very likely repeat offenders).
The weird thing about this is that AFAIK there is no requirement for a similar registry for violent offenders whose crime did not involve sex.
So is drunk driving, manslaughter, genocide, mail fraud, and yet people convicted of those don’t have to publicize their past/predilections to the neighborhood when they move to a new place. In other words: Your argument has no legs.
As mentioned earlier in the thread: Just as there is a database (of varying reliability) of people whose records should prevent them from buyng firearms, under the Wetterling Act there is a national database of people who have been convicted of sexual felonies, and there are state and federal laws mandating that it be kept up to date and accessible to interested parties.
As to why this is, that starts drifing away from objective answers. According to that reliable primary source for law enforcement, the opening credits of Law&Order: “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous”
Back to objective answers, along the line “interested parties” who need access to the database was extended to mean the community in general, most notably under “Megan’s Law”
Now, let’s be clear: everyone’s adult criminal records are public documents unless the court itself seals them or expunges them. The sex offender registry is notable for being specific to a type of offense, and there being a mandate that it be easily accessible to the public and that this be publicized. For your regular criminal, you have to look him up specifically. For the sex offenders, I just went to the state police page, hit a tab, entered my Zip (Postal) Code, and it put on my page 23 names, pictures and addresses of Registered Offenders currently living here.
Drifting away again onto motivations, these laws derive from a supposed “knowledge” that sexual offenders were an extraordinary recidivism risk and likely will reoffend if not kept closely monitored, and from there public opinion demand to know where they are so they can be kept away.
It’s part of a moral panic about sex offenders, and the law was made to appease those panicking. Sex offenders are mostly usually known to the victim (family or friends) but there is a common view they are weird monsters, stalking neighbourhoods. The registration idea plays into that fear.
And to keep “virtue” signalling to panicking soccer mums, legislators have kept broadening it out to the point where people can be on a register for urinating in public.
Background checks for firearms are made against a federal database (although some states add additional requirements.) That database is partially populated with information by reports from states along with federal reporting for things like federal crimes and military court martial convictions.
Sometimes that reporting is less than perfect. If Iowa screws up reporting of a commitment the federal background check will not disqualify the person based on it. It does not matter where the gun dealer is located. Even someone buying a gun in the same state as where they were committed might come back as qualified to buy a gun on the background check.
The accuracy of state reporting matters for the federal background check. Whether the disqualifying event happened in the same state as the dealer does not.
When you buy a gun from somebody who has a federal firearms license (i.e., any commercial dealer), you have to fill out a form that asks questions about things like whether you’ve ever been convicted of certain crimes, or been diagnosed with certain types of mental illness. Lying on the form is itself a crime.
True but the point is they can’t. Or, if you really want to expand the analogy - the reality is that pretty much all witches can only turn their close friends, relatives and those in their care into toads, and all those people know about their conviction for doing so anyway. Witches don’t turn random people in their neighbourhood into toads. And frankly if a witch did want to turn a random person into a toad they could just travel a few blocks to where no one knows they come from a house with a marked door, and their marked door would make no difference.
Marking the door is about showing off your anti-witch credentials, and social ostracism, and does not serve any practical purpose.
Yes but these laws add nothing. The re-offending is typically through working with children. Not through random grabbing of neighbours.
Employing people to work with children should (and where I come from does) involve getting a police clearance that someone has no relevant criminal convictions. No public register is required.
According to this data, the recidivism rate is quite a bit lower than commonly believed, at least in Canada (where there tends to be a greater emphasis on rehabilitation for all types of offenders).
I think the answer about why we have sex offender registries is a combination of the fact that some of these offenders are genuinely dangerous and have potential to re-offend, plus the fact that we as a society tend to have strong emotions about sex offences, sometimes in effect regarding them more seriously than other violent offenses such as, say, murder.
This sometimes leads to this kind of hysteria which pretty much guarantees that rehabilitation is impossible (this is in Bradford County, Florida, in case anyone cares):
While things are not quite as insane in Canada, things can get strange here, too. The story below involves someone who was convicted and jailed for poking holes in condoms in the hope of getting his girlfriend pregnant so she wouldn’t break up with him. Reprehensible, of course, and worthy of jail time, but because this is classified as a sex crime, he also has to register as a sex offender in the national registry, where he will probably remain for life.
And yet the guy can presumably get in his car and drive ten minutes away to where no one knows where he is from - ie this is completely pointless except as punishment by public ostracism, which is of course a major element of what it’s actually about.
If it were actually about prevention the logical thing would be to require offenders to have it tattooed on their forehead. I’m sure someone has proposed it…
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