Many, many years ago.  Back when Vera Katz was Speaker of the House and the legislature decided to take a crack at setting new limits on gun ownership, a bill emerged that would prohibit people who had been civilly committed from buying, owning or possessing a firearm.  The country was still reeling from the acts of John Hinkley and politicians wanted to make folk feel safer, however illusory that safety might be.  I argued at the time that civil commitment was a a poor standard to use to judge ability: many people were committed who were not dangerous and the whole purpose of commitment was recovery.  To my amazement, legislators were willing to compromise the point.  A provision was added to the mental health commitment law that allowed a judge to bar gun ownership but such a prohibition would not be automatic.  A process was also put into place to allow those who had been barred to show, at a future point, that they were no longer a risk.

Four years later, I was not so persuasive (or lucky).  The legislature established a permanent ban on gun ownership in Oregon for those who are committed because of mental illness.  What most people in Oregon didn't know was that the federal government had outlawed gun possession by committed people long before any of these laws were enacted in our state.  Oregonians were not unique in this knowledge gap.  The feds had never done much to let people know.

But then came the Virginia Tech shootings and Congress decided to take stronger action.  It created a nation-wide, FBI registry for conviction and commitment information.  Law enforcement and firearm merchants will be able to use the registry to determine if a person is prohibited from having a gun.  But this won't work unless the information gets to the FBI.  And that's where House Bill 2853 and my deja vu moment come into play.

Governor Kulongoski learned that only two Oregon records were in the FBI registry and that the Oregon State Police would lose a bunch of federal grant money unless we got with the program.  This prompted a rush of work to put together a bill (sponsored by Rep. Galizio) that would require the collection and transmittal of the required data.  And when various stakeholders were brought together to discuss the bill, I was there saying the same things I had said back in the late 1980s.  Again, to my amazement, there was flexibility in the state's position and after many hurried compromises, amendments and hearings, a bill got out of the House Rules Committee.

I don't know how you feel about firearms.  They are not at the top of DRO's agenda.  But the US Supreme Court has found gun possession to be a a fundamental right and a bunch of folks in Congress have earmarked "persons adjudicated as a mental defective or those committed to mental institutions" as being unworthy of exercising this right.  The original Oregon bill would have gone further to include people who were in the state hospital for only evaluation and those found incapable of facing criminal charges due to their young age.  It did not provide a way for a person to demonstrate that he should no longer be barred, did not provide a way to expunge a commitment and did not require notice to those who might be affected.  When it came to people with mental illness or developmental disabilities, life-long incapacity and dangerousness was assumed and need not be proven. 

More will need to be done to balance public safety and individual rights in a manner that is not discriminatory. As is often the case, disability discrimination arose in Congress and in HB 2853 from unfounded assumptions about people's abilities.  Rep. Sara Gelser, a Rules Committee member, said it best: People who have never committed a crime or hurt anyone should not lose a constitutional right because they have a disability.