Annmarie Timmins
| New Hampshire Bulletin
Pro-gun rights groups have made a Second Amendment argument against a New Hampshire bill that would stop gun sales to individuals whom a court had found dangerous enough to require commitment to a psychiatric hospital. One speaker warned a House committee at a public hearing last month against limiting the “God-given” right to own a gun.
The New Hampshire Firearms Coalition is reaching out to voters with another argument that mental health advocates – and the bill’s Republican sponsor – say is derogatory: It argues that it is “crazy” and “insane” to address public safety concerns by adding individuals hospitalized in limited circumstances to a do-not-sell list, as House Bill 1711 would.
The bill was prompted by the November shooting death of state hospital security officer Bradley Hass by former patient John Madore, who was then shot and killed by a state trooper. Madore had been committed to the state hospital at least once and had his guns confiscated in 2016.
The gun rights coalition instead argues that people hospitalized due to mental illness and dangerousness should be detained in the hospital until they are well. Upon release, it says, they should not be kept from buying a gun.
“If these people are so violent that they need to be disarmed, why are they released at all?” reads the flyer, which was sent to some House Republicans and their constituents. On the opposite side, it says: “Crazy is as crazy does.”
Rep. Terry Roy, a Deerfield Republican who co-sponsored HB 1711 with House Democratic Rep. David Meuse of Portsmouth, received the flyer, as did his constituents.
“It was insulting,” said Roy. “It was demeaning to anyone who has a mental illness, which a large portion of our population will at some point.” An estimated 1 in 5 people experiences a mental illness each year. Roy said that once he explained the bill to the couple of constituents who called him, “they were happy.”
Susan Stearns, executive director of NAMI New Hampshire, responded similarly when she saw the flyer.
“It’s deliberately trying to exploit the stereotype around people with mental illness being violent and needing to be kept away from society,” she said. “Ultimately that hurts a lot of Granite Staters and perpetuates that type of stereotype and stigma.”
Stearns and Roy said the flyer also misrepresents and overlooks the bill’s intent and measured balance between public safety and respecting the civil rights of people with mental illness. Not all mental health hospitalizations would qualify someone to be added to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System. And there would be a clearly defined process for getting off the list.
Rep. J.R. Hoell, a Dunbarton Republican and secretary of the New Hampshire Firearms Coalition, interprets the bill and flyer differently.
While the flyer does not say so, Hoell said he believes most people with mental illness are not violent and are more often the victims of violence. The use of “crazy” and “insane” was a “play on words,” he said, not intended to be insulting.
In Hoell’s mind, the bill would wrongly criminalize mental illness by allowing the federal government to deny people who’ve never committed a crime their Second Amendment rights simply because they’ve been involuntarily hospitalized due to danger concerns.
However, federal law already prohibits anyone committed to a psychiatric institution from buying or possessing a gun; New Hampshire, however, does not submit the relevant information to the database.
“This magic list does not solve the issue,” Hoell said, noting that upon release someone can get a gun beyond a gun store. “If you are a threat to others, you need residential care. If you don’t need residential care, you are not a threat to others. It’s A or B.”
Meuse remembers the day Roy, who has voted against every gun safety bill Meuse has supported, asked him to co-sponsor HB 1711. The two have collaborated on bail reform legislation but never shared common ground on gun bills.
“I just remember being really surprised and then thinking to myself, ‘OK, don’t do anything to screw this up,’” Meuse said. “This is a really good thing.”
It will go to the full House later this month with an overwhelming 18-2 vote from the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee that it be passed. In emotional testimony, the state hospital’s associate medical director called the shooting, during which the hospital security notification system failed, “one of the worst moments of my life.”
While eight committee Republicans joined Democrats in backing the bill, Roy knows he’ll face a fight on the House floor from Hoell, libertarians, and some in his own party.
“I’m disappointed in the shortsightedness of the Second Amendment community,” Roy said. “What they don’t seem to get is that we are better off not having dangerous people buying firearms because every time there is a mass shooting and someone has a mental health issue, there are calls for more restrictions on firearms.”
The bill would not apply to people who seek behavioral health treatment voluntarily or those who are the subject of an involuntary emergency admission petition.
The legislation would apply only to people who are involuntarily admitted on a non-emergency basis, after a court hearing, during which they would have legal representation. A judge would have to find them to have a mental condition that makes them dangerous to themselves or others.
The bill allows a court to confiscate an individual’s firearms and ammunition, but the person would have more control over how those guns are taken and where they are held.
The bill would provide a person the opportunity to petition a court for review of their “mental capacity,” a first step to being removed from the database. In some cases, they could do that within 15 days after their “absolute” discharge, meaning they are complying with treatment requirements. In other cases they must wait six months.
The Disability Rights Center-NH and NAMI NH required the bill include a process to be removed from the database. And the former persuaded the committee to limit the type of information entered into the database to protect individuals’ privacy. Even then, the Disability Rights Center-NH said it won’t support the bill because of civil rights concerns but also won’t oppose it.
Those same civil rights concerns will lead Hoell to oppose it vehemently.
At best, he said, he’d support a state “patient list” of people deemed a danger to others due to a short-term mental illness. That would keep information out of federal hands, a priority, he said. He would support a legal path to regaining the right to buy and purchase a gun.
Meuse believes there are other New Hampshire gun owners, some of them lawmakers, who will split with Hoell and back the bill. And he thinks the shooting death of Haas by an individual who was committed to a psychiatric facility and had his guns confiscated will be persuasive.
“When you see the surveys, it’s not just Democrats and the left, (but) a lot of people who own firearms, who hunt, who basically think that we’ve just sort of reached the point where if we don’t do something, the consequences of doing nothing are going to catch up to us even faster.”
This story was originally published by the New Hampshire Bulletin.
