[Ike666]

I think this last is a bad idea. The net the feds would be casting is way too wide. The most likely result is that many of the current generation of returning soldiers, sailors, and airmen would be actively discouraged from seeking the help they so deserve after serving our country.

The majority already eschew the Veterans Administration system because of a fundamental mistrust of this large, passionless bureaucracy. When that is combined with the predilection to deny problems because of the warrior ethos we get our already way too high suicide rate. I believe that we are repeating the mistakes made with the Vietnam-era vets and adding new ones to the mix. After leaving active duty, I worked for three years as a research psychologist at the VA - it is an insensitive, intransigent institution despite the fact that there are many truly dedicated mental health professionals working there. The monolithic organization starves the professional life out of most in a matter of years and our vets go under-served again.

If we further stigmatize them by putting them on a list, then I expect the problems will only grow.

In point of fact, we do know something about risk management with the mentally ill. Seldom does the mental illness alone the predict violent acting out. When you control for the substance abuse and prior history of violence, the incidence of violence by the mentally ill is actually slightly less than in the general population. It has been mentioned on this forum a number of times that the seriously mentally ill are more likely to be the recipients of violence than the perpetrators.

Clinical judgement in the prediction of future violence is notoriously inaccurate with a tendency to grossly over-predict violence (false positives) while at the same time miss the bad actors (false negatives). However, a generation of research has resulted in a quiver of actuarial instruments which when combined with standardized training in the administration of the instruments by experienced MHPs results in far better than chance sensitivity and specificity (reduces both false positives and false negatives). But it is expensive to get a mental health professional spooled up to be competent on the instruments. And the government is not so much interested in real solutions as it is in the appearance of doing something "meaningful."

I agree with the general principle that public safety trumps the individual civil liberties of the potential mass shooter. But if we once again fail to do what we know works and instead sign on for the many meaningless proposals that appease the uninformed public, we'll be dismantling the very system we want our 2nd Amendment rights to protect.

Moreover, once identified, there are treatment protocols that work with the potentially violent mentally ill. Usually a combination of drug and talking therapies. While we'll never have a perfect system, we can damn sight do a lot better than we're doing now. They are expensive and often target an indigent population who cannot afford the treatment - the forgotten. But it looks like we are going to spend our limited funds on bogus remedies that we all know (based on prior history) will have no meaningful impact on the problem.