It was no surprise that Governor Cuomo’s State of the State address focused on the issue of gun control in New York.
Following several tragedies in recent months, Cuomo made an impassioned plea during his address on Wednesday for the state’s legislature to ignore pressure from gun lobbies and deliver New York the toughest gun laws in the nation.
Cuomo put forward a list of proposed lawsthat include: implementing a ban on assault rifles and high capacity magazines, a single license standard across the state for background checks, closing the loophole on private sales, and an increased onus on mental health professionals to report at-risk individuals.
It’s this last point that has Professor of law at U-Buffalo Charles Ewing worried.
Mental Health controversy
“I’m a lawyer and a psychologist and I think that it’s truly misguided to think that this is a mental health problem. This isn’t a mental health problem, this is a gun problem.”
Ewing says it would be very difficult for mental health professionals to identify potentially dangerous individuals, and the process would severely undermine the privacy and rights of patients.
Additionally, Ewing notes that mental health workers are generally not trained to make determinations about the potential danger of a patient in regards to the area of gun violence.
“As the law stands now, if someone is mentally ill and dangerous to self or others they can be civilly committed, but that’s a fairly high threshold for civil commitment. I don’t know what the standard would be in regards to reporting someone who is a gun owner.”
Professor of law at NYU, James Jacobs agrees that the mental health portion of the proposed law would present implementation problems, as well as a backlash from the mental health community.
But, he believes gun violence of the magnitude seen at Sandy Hook Elementary School does involve a mental health component.
“All of these killers, they’re all mentally deranged. I mean there’s no reason for a person to go into a school, or into a shopping center and kill people at random. I mean there’s no point to it. It reflects deep psychopathology. It is a mental health problem. It is a serious mental health problem, and the question is can people who are in that kind of mental condition, can they be identified and controlled before they go off like that?”
As a law it could stand
Jacobs says the measure could be passed from a legal standpoint, and the law would stand unless it was proved to be unconstitutional.
He says there would definitely be challenges to it, and it could be said to be unconstitutional through a violation of privacy rights of people who seek medical assistance.
He also says that such a law could discourage people from seeking assistance in the first place, creating a whole new issue. Jacobs says he doesn’t expect that element of the package the Cuomo administration has proposed, will end up going anywhere.
When it comes to the rest of the proposed gun regulations, he says that the overall ideas are good but implementation could prove tough.
In regards to the banning of high capacity magazines, Jacobs says:
“I don’t know if his [Cuomo’s] proposal means to prohibit the ones already in existence, that’s a big issue because there are millions and millions of these high capacity magazines in existence and usually the gun control laws grandfather them in. If that’s the case then banning new ones won’t do very much because there’ll still be a flourishing market from the old ones.”
U-Buffalo professor Charles Ewing has a similar concern.
A national standard
“Toughening the gun control laws in New York state might make it more difficult for people to use or keep those guns in New York; but it wouldn’t keep guns out of the hands of New Yorkers,” Ewing says.
“The proposals the governor has made are very positive proposals, but they will probably only work in the context of some federal legislation on the regulation of guns, and particularly the transport of guns across state borders and national borders.”
Vice President Joe Biden is set to advise President Obama on a federal position on gun control by Tuesday. Reporting by a various agencies on Thursday, indicates Biden is looking at a mixture of “universal” background checks, additional research on the causes of gun violence and a similar ban on high capacity magazines as proposed for New York.
On Wednesday, Cuomo said that New York can lead the nation in toughening regulations and both Jacobs and Ewing agree the Governor’s proposal is a positive step toward closing the loopholes that currently exist. The proposed additional responsibilities on mental health professionals will continue to be debated in coming weeks and months.
