Brickbat: Leave Your Gun at the Office
A Pennsylvania court has rejected State Trooper Michael L. Keyes's attempt to possess a firearm while off duty. Keyes was stripped of his right to own a gun seven years ago after he was involuntarily committed for mental health treatment after repeatedly trying to kill himself. He won a legal battle to get reinstated as a state trooper, but so far the courts have upheld stripping him of his right to have a gun off duty.
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This actually raises the thorny issue of gun rights and mental health. Sort of. I don’t consider suicidal to be crazy. Certainly not Adam Lanza crazy.
Also, how does one repeatedly try to kill oneself and fail? Since he’s a cop, I’m going to guess he kept trying to shoot himself.
I wonder how many dogs he killed while trying to kill himself. 🙁
Good thing he didn’t hit his wife or he wouldn’t be able to carry a gun on duty at all. Thanks Frank Latenberg. Hope you’re enjoying the heat.
Oh, that’s a comforting combination.
I am kind of surprised the guy doesnt get a pass altogether.
He should.
Multiple suicide attempts is a symptom of depression, which isn’t a psychotic condition and is treatable. He was never crazy, he was depressed which are two very different things.
The dude is being fucked and robbed of his rights.
Well, yeah. But when I worry about people getting fucked and robbed of their rights, I don’t start with the people who do the fucking and robbing.
I’m not sure whether to feel schadenfreude or sympathy. It’s a real Schr?dinger.
What does a cartoon character who plays classical music on a toy piano have to do with this?
Because his piano is both there & not there at the same time and he keeps on hearing music. We’re afraid he’ll shoot his piano in its “not there” state, miss and still not kill Lucy.
Don’t talk shit about Lucy!
-facepalm-
Definitely schadenfreude, especially after LEAA fucked us gun owners over with a pine branch covered in Tiger Balm.
Apparently you can leave your alt-text at the office too. 🙁
Alt text is a treat well behaved children get during a car ride, like a slurpee or sunday from dq. If you keep asking you get nothing!
How the fuck does the guy get his job back? Let him go work at seven eleven.
I don’t often side with cops but wtf… Suicide is self ownership.
Suicide, in the eyes of the state, is a crime … because statists think they own you, and their property isn’t allowed to go kill itself.
Seriously. That’s the underlying legal theory, stripped of the rationalizations.
Exactly. Either that or they’re just plain sadists. If someone figures they’d be better off dead than living a hopeless life…too damn bad, says the state.
He can’t use firearms to defend his home or to hunt…only to bring into volatile confrontations with suspects.Makes sense.
Suspect-assisted cop suicide?
Can I have have a gun at home? No, you are way too bat shit crazy to allow that. Oh, then can I carry a gun around employed as an authority figure with an accepted right to used violence at will over everyone in my precinct? Of course, wearing a badge takes care of everything. You can’t break the law when you are the law.
As much as I like to see a cop treated like We the Little People, it’s still not clear to me why suffering from depression in the past automatically disqualifies one from exercising their 2A rights.
Check that:
…it’s still not clear to me why ever having suffered suffering from depression in the past automatically disqualifies one from exercising their 2A rights.
You can’t read?
That prohibition does not amount to a breach of Keyes’ rights under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Ford Elliott found, because it applies only to an “extremely small” class of citizens and has a solid public safety basis.
Those parts in the Constitution about ‘Congress shall make no law’ don’t apply as long as the laws only affect an extremely small class of people.
In his opinion, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York found that the plaintiffs did not have standing for their lawsuit because such searches occur so rarely that “there is not a substantial risk that their electronic devices will be subject to a search or seizure without reasonable suspicion.”
That’s one hell of a nut punch for the first day of the year.
lawsuit was filed in 2010 by Pascal Abidor, a graduate student in Islamic studies, who sued the government after American border agents removed him from an Amtrak train crossing from Canada to New York. He was handcuffed, placed in a cell and questioned for several hours, then his laptop was seized and kept for 11 days.
No substantial risk to the plaintiffs, huh?
“While it is true that laptops may make overseas work more convenient,” [Judge Korman] wrote, “the precautions plaintiffs may choose to take to ‘mitigate’ the alleged harm associated with the remote possibility of a border search are simply among the many inconveniences associated with international travel.”
“I can’t say it wasn’t foreseeable based on the line of questioning by the judge during the initial hearing,” Mr. Abidor said. “He just seemed so skeptical of the basic premise that people need to travel with devices.”
Need has nothing to do with it. You can leave your papers and effects at home, so the 4th doesn’t protect those outside of your house, right?
Korman deserves to be reamed out with a rusty spike for that horseshit. Simply one of the many inconveniences associated with sucking statist cock.
“These checks are essential to enforcing the law, and protecting national security and public safety,” Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement, “always with the shared goals of protecting the American people while respecting civil rights and civil liberties.”
The one thing they can’t detect is irony, I guess.
Oh, I can read just fine:
*reads…re-reads…re-re-reads again once more…scratches melon*
Hmmmm. The extremely small class part must be in invisible ink or something. Here – give me your lighter.
I would ROTFL if that judge ended up with a child pron distribution virus on his home PC, his office PC, his tablet, his smartphone…
I’m all for cops who want to kill themselves, if that means they don’t want to go around killing dogs and “civilians”.
Fire when ready!
Just the act of applying for a job with the police department should be sufficient evidence of mental illness to justify forfeiture of 2nd Amendment rights.
Rights issues aside, the ruling is pretty nonsensical. If he can have the gun when he’s on duty, then there’s absolutely no way to stop him from doing whatever unwanted acts with the gun he wants. He just has to do them during duty hours. As with most laws, this law only works on people who aren’t actually a danger in the first place.
So he can’t attempt suicide while on duty? His uniform provides a magical antidepressant force field? (not that I think depression or any mental health issue should disqualify him when he’s off duty – just commenting on the complete lack of logic here)
That’s more or less my view. My attitude was more startled and inarticulate. I suppose the idea someone who supposedly couldn’t be trusted around a gun was returned to the position of being authorized to initiate the use of force… Sorry, it leaves me inarticulate. Baffled.
Sounds like some serious business dude.
http://www.BeinAnon.tk
So much for the “cops are on duty 24/7 and need to be carrying with standard magazines anywhere in the U.S. and even after they retire” gun control theory.
I’m also barred from owning a firearm in PA. I’m an engineering student with a 3.4 GPA who was given drugs at a party and ended up going to the hospital because I was making a scene. I wouldn’t consent to it, so they had me “involuntarily committed” for about two hours until I was picked up by my parents. I have no history of violence — not even so much as a schoolyard fight. I wasn’t trying to kill myself or anyone else.
What is unconstitutional is that an “involuntary commitment” of this sort does not involve a hearing or a judge. It’s all handled by bureaucrats at the social welfare office.
It pisses me off and I’m going to fight it when I’m out of school.
You should have a good case. I’m not familiar with PA laws but I am with mental health laws in many other states.
In fact, if you have not fully investigated this before, you may even want to check the definitions in PA to see if you even qualify as “involuntary committment.” Your being held for a psych eval involuntarily may be what is known instead as an “involuntary detention” and does not take away your 2A rights.
“Involuntary Committment” usually means you have had some presentation in front of a magistrate/hearing officer/judge after you have already been on an involuntary detention, and the judge determines you still need involuntary treatment.
If you had a situation where you were just held in an ER for a couple of hours detoxing until your folks could come get you, I’m guessing you still have all your rights — an involuntary psych hold that has not been “validated” by a judge or medical officer for continuation usually isn’t even reported to agencies. If for some reason PA law is excessively draconian and punishes anyone for any minor psych eval, there would have to be a fairly simple legal procedure to fix things, and you should have no problem getting a judge to restore your rights.
I’m also barred from owning a firearm in PA. I’m an engineering student with a 3.4 GPA who was given drugs at a party and ended up going to the hospital because I was making a scene. I wouldn’t consent to it, so they had me “involuntarily committed” for about two hours until I was picked up by my parents. I have no history of violence — not even so much as a schoolyard fight. I wasn’t trying to kill myself or anyone else.
What is unconstitutional is that an “involuntary commitment” of this sort does not involve a hearing or a judge. It’s all handled by bureaucrats at the social welfare office.
It pisses me off and I’m going to fight it when I’m out of school.
In every 302, a petitioner is required to sign the 302 and appear at a hearing, if necessary. A petitioner must have first-hand knowledge of the dangerous conduct and be willing to go to an emergency room or the Office of Behavioral Health (OBH), located at One Smithfield Street, to sign the 302 form.
http://www.alleghenycounty.us/dhs/commitment.aspx
If this guy can’t be trusted with a gun at home, why in hell is he being allowed to keep his badge? The judge who decided THAT was a “right” should go straight to prison.
We are a nation of laws, not men, and what you see here is the intersection of two stupid laws (the one against suicide and the one exempting on-duty LEOs from the same gun laws as the rest of us). I agree it makes no sense but this is the only way forward given the rule of law.
No exceptions in the second amendment.