Honestly can’t imagine what mental health screens might look like. Would need to see the detail; maybe it’s the test Trump took recently, maybe not.
It is done in Canada, and the background checks take into account criminal and mental health records, as well as any domestic violence records. Of course, it does mean a national database (which does exist to some extent in the US), but it’s also going to mean, when it concerns mental health, just what conditions should be a red flag. Obviously no one is going to want a paranoid schizophrenic getting their hands on a gun, but what about someone with Type 2 Bipolar whose symptoms have never been that severe and are managed well by medication? At that point, you suddenly have doctors and other health care professionals becoming gatekeepers, and is that a role they are going to be comfortable with, or even fully understand what needs to be done?
Canada has had gun control legislation in one form or another for a while, and at one point even had the long gun registry, which has now been eliminated. And it does have restricted and banned weapons as well. But then again, Canada doesn’t have the Second Amendment, so gun control is at least legislatively a lot easier (though, as the long gun registry debacle showed, no less controversial).
And even if everyone agrees background checks need to be stiffened up, it still means all the moving parts have to work. It’s anecdotal, but even I, up here in gun control Canuckistan, have seen at least one person whose personal details I know well enough handed back his guns by the police after a family altercation, and said to my wife “I cannot believe they’re giving that nut his guns back.” Maybe you can reduce the mass shootings a bit, but you and I have already discussed this, and I think we both agree, availability isn’t real the core of the problem. It’s the wider culture; Hollywood with its gun fetishism, the irresponsible way the media reports gun violence, it’s the cultural aspects of the gun that need to be changed.
And then there’s the logistics. Anyone who just thinks if somehow magically the 2nd Amendment is repealed tomorrow morning, the millions of guns out there are just going to start getting dropped off at the local police station are living in a pretty rosy fevered dream.
