‘No compromise’ gun groups shoot themselves in the foot

[SecularMotion]

Gun Owners of America (GOA) has been attacking New Hampshire’s Senate Bill 244 from the beginning with the shock propaganda phrase, “See a shrink, lose your guns.” The New Hampshire Firearms Coalition (NHFC) has adopted the GOA slogan. They’re both wrong. And tragically, that slogan may scare people away from getting the mental health help they really need.

SB 244 would add New Hampshire to the other 37 states that report mental health gun-possession disqualifiers in the same way as felony conviction gun disqualifiers to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NCIS), which licensed dealers must query by phone when they sell a gun. Importantly, it also would create, for the first time, a legal mechanism to “un-prohibit” people whose mental health problems have been cured.

The New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee is considering an amendment proposed by the committee chair, Sen. Sharon Carson, R-Londonderry, that would retain the second part of the bill — to allow people to remove themselves from the disqualified list — while deferring the first part to a commission to investigate its nuances. Unaccountably, GOA and the NHFC oppose even this version.

The problem with the “see a shrink, lose your guns” rhetoric is that it’s simply not true. People who object to SB 244 keep saying that the bill would disqualify people from possessing guns, but that’s a huge mistake: the people who would be reported to NICS are already disqualified. They are disqualified whether their names are on NICS or not.

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20140311/OPINION02/140319908/0/FRONTPAGE

[Kolesar]

1. After Sandy Hook, their distraction message was: "not enough funding for mental health"

Since they are basically soulless, their message "boomeranged" on them.