In the span of little over half a year, hundreds of thousands of names have been added to a federal database used to screen potential gun-buyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said this afternoon. Since the shootings at Virginia Tech in August, the number of names in the database has doubled to almost 400,000, Mukasey said at a meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General.
No one can dispute that screening people attempting to purchase weapons is necessary-- even the NRA approves of the database. Yet collecting names of the mentally ill for a national database seems like an unsettling topic for the new attorney general to address in his first policy speech since replacing Alberto Gonzales, who resigned from the Justice Department under the shame of having approved warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. The names are only collected from courts and other authoritative bodies-- not from private mental health records from hospitals or insurance companies. Still, the possibility for abuse of the list is scary to think about, especially given the Justice Department's current reputation.
Perhaps some freedoms have to be ceded in the name of safety; Rudy Giuliani argued as much during last night's debate when asked about the strict gun laws he enforced as mayor of New York. "I enforced all laws very aggressively, and that's the reason we reduced shootings by 74 percent," Giuliani said in last night's debate. "And we went from being one of the most dangerous cities in the country to being one of the safest." While it's true that the city changed dramatically while he was mayor, it's also true that Giuliani was notorious for using draconian measures to get things done. Such measures are sometimes tolerable, but they are more questionable when they make vulnerable a group of people who are already targets of discrimination. People suffering from mental disease don't need the extra burden of having public figures like an NRA spokesman calling them "mentally defective" to the AP.
But as long as the database is used appropriately, it should be a huge benefit for the country; the news of its growth should have been great. Instead, it only feels like a reminder of how much the Justice Department has to earn back our trust.
1 comment:
By profiling everyone in the country, the theory goes, we can prevent crime.
But when things, as they say in the vernacular, "turn to shit" which inevitably happens at various points in a nation's history, profile databases are among the first weapons used to trample an individual's rights. Once you do that, you are stomping on society's rights also.
It's a scary world we live in.
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