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sc94597 on 15 June 2017
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Teeqoz said:
sc94597 said:

Gun regulations are already based on mental health in the United States. If you were involuntary institutionalized then you no longer are able to legally own a gun, unless you get a judge to sign off on it. The laws proposed in the United States are intended to limit their distribution amongst people who are deemed undesirable. The long history of gun control in the United States has its roots in racism ("black people shouldn't be able to defend themselves against the KKK, lets enact gun control"), and classism ("that poor redneck *isn't intelligent to own a gun, I don't trust him. ") 

*Note redneck originated as a class label of farmers, and then spread to the American proleteriat after the industrial revolution. It is very much a class-oriented term. 

I am sure you could do better psych-evaluations (clearly the current screening methods doesn't catch all the nut-jobs), but regardless, that doesn't mean the only other option is denying gun ownership to an economic class...

No screening method will catch all nut jobs in a country with a population of over 300 million, without abridging the right to privacy and confidentiality alone. 

Actually existing proposals for gun laws by American legislators disproportanately affect ownership amongst the lower classes, and that is their intention. The problem in the United States is not gun ownership. It is a variety of other things. It is drug criminalization and its effects on racial minorities and low income persons which pushes them into the drug trade and therefore gangs. It is the lack of mental health resources for the people who need them. It is the marginalization of certain groups in society to where they feel like they have nothing to lose. All of these are conductive to the majority of gun deaths which are 1. suicides, then 2. gang warfare, and then 3. accidents. Mass shootings rate at 2% of all gun homicides, which are themselves a small percentage of all deaths in general. 

Solving suicide, solving gang warfare, solving accidents, solving mental health access are priorities but proposing silly laws that just make gun ownership impractical/uneconomical for poor people, and merely inconvenient for the upper classes is not a solution. It is just policy based on classism.