Garance is uncomfortable with creating a registry of the mentally ill:
More than half of Americans experience one or more mental illnesses over the course of their lives, and around 26 percent of Americans over age 18 each year experience at least one, primarily anxiety disorders and mood disorders like depression. The overwhelming majority of them are no danger to anyone at all. But with so substantial a portion of the country going through bouts of one thing or another over the course of their lives, the idea that any federal database could capture enough information to encompass every one who might one day be a threat anywhere is akin to hoping for a government staff of precogs.
And that’s not even getting into the highly problematic question of whether the government should mark millions of people who will never hurt anyone for a carve-out from the Second Amendment, and the privacy and stigmatization issues involved in cataloging harmless people who suffer from common mental illnesses in order to label them as potential threats in a federal government database. The idea of creating a mental health database instead of pursuing policies that involve direct regulation of guns is one put forward, not surprisingly, by the gun lobby, which knows that it’s easier to blame gun violence on out-of-control crazies than on abundant access to deadly weapons by disturbed individuals with evil intent bent on mayhem and murder.
Ambinder has similar worries:
I am pretty certain that there is no reliable matrix to predict, with anything close to reasonable certainty, that a person with “X” traits and “Y” life experiences will perpetrate a mass shooting, or otherwise brutalize people. So I believe that a mental health surveillance system, hastily constructed, would be a significant and worrisome expansion of the state, and an ineffective one, at that.
The Dish 