Mental patients are regaining gun rights
By Michael Luo New York Times / July 3, 2011 
PULASKI, Va. - In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face down in his carport “talking gibberish,’’ according to court records. He later told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard and hearing voices.
When French’s daughter discovered that her father’s commitment meant it was illegal for him to have firearms, she and her husband removed his guns and kept them after French was released in January 2010 on a new regime of mood-stabilizing drugs.
Ten months later, he appeared in General District Court - the body that handles small claims and traffic infractions - to ask a judge to restore his gun rights. After a brief hearing, in which French’s lengthy history of relapses never came up, he walked out with an order reinstating his right to possess firearms.
Across the country, states are increasingly allowing people like French, who lost their firearm rights because of mental illness, to petition to have them restored.
A handful of states have had such restoration laws on their books for some time, but with little notice, more than 20 states have passed similar measures since 2008.
The intent of these state laws is to enable people to regain the right to buy and possess firearms if it is determined that they are not a threat to public safety.
But an examination of restoration procedures across the country, along with dozens of cases, shows that the process for making that determination is governed in many places by vague standards and few specific requirements.
States have mostly entrusted these decisions to judges, who are often ill-equipped to conduct investigations from the bench. Many seemed willing simply to give petitioners the benefit of the doubt. The results often seem haphazard.
At least a few hundred people with histories of mental health issues get their gun rights back each year. The number promises to grow, since most of the new state laws are beginning to take effect.
The issue goes to the heart of the nation’s complicated relationship with guns, testing the delicate balance between the need to safeguard the public and the dictates of what the Supreme Court has proclaimed to be a fundamental constitutional right.
In case after case examined by The New York Times, judges made decisions without important information about an applicant’s mental health.
The difficulty of assessing risk emerges in places like Los Angeles, where the Superior Court conducts a relatively thorough review of firearms rights requests.
The Times found multiple instances over the last decade in which people who won back their gun rights went on to be charged with or convicted of violent or gun-related crimes, including spousal battery, negligent discharge of a firearm, or assault with a firearm.
Then there are the nightmare cases - like that of Ryan Anthony, 35, a former Emmy Award-winning animator at Disney who was involuntarily hospitalized in mid-2001 after losing his job and separating from his wife.
Anthony filed a petition to get back his gun rights in early 2002, telling a court-appointed psychiatrist that he wanted to go skeet shooting.
A few weeks after the court granted his petition, Anthony bought a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, holed up in a Holiday Inn in Burbank, Calif., and committed suicide.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
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