If you're a copmmercial truck driver, thare drugs - prescribed as well as recreational - that will put your driving career on pause.
Likewise, if youre a commercial pilot, the FAA and other civil aviation authorities around the world will take a stringent look at the medication pilots are on, to make sure that any interactions and uncerlying conditions don't constitute a danger to the traveling public.
Neither driving trucks nor flying planes is a constitutionally-guaranteed civil irght. Gun rights are.
And when it comes to gun rights, the broad catetory of "mental health" is already a red line, with diagnosed violent mental illness being a disqualifier in the federal database that every gun dealer goes to to check backgropunds for gn purchases. It's an OK system, provided that the various state and federal authorities actually report their data to the Feds (which they don't always, with results that have indeed been ghastly).
And they're predictated on diligent reporting of often-subjective claims, which is very unreliable. Yale Law prof Ian Ayres in an op-ed in the LA Times notes last month's shooting in New York City, where the shooter should have been ineliglble to purchase firearems because of documented, but unreported, mental illness issues.
Under federal and most state laws, people who are involuntarily committed by a judicial order that deems them a likely danger to themselves or others are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms for a period of time. Even so, many states have created “emergency hold” procedures through which individuals assessed to pose a public safety risk can be involuntarily held for up to 72 hours without a judicial order. Before July’s Manhattan shooting, [shooiter Shane Tamura] had twice been subjected to such an emergency hold in Nevada because a health professional deemed him to be sufficiently dangerous.
However, Tamura was not legally prohibited from purchasing a weapon despite these previous psychiatric holds, because in Nevada emergency holds do not trigger a loss of gun rights. That is not the case in a handful of other states. For example, in California, anyone who’s committed on an emergency hold basis is prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms for five years. Washington suspends gun rights for six months after an emergency hold. In these states, the names of those placed on holds are also entered into the FBI background checklist, and those individuals are blocked from buying guns during the period of prohibition.
"Mental health" in is most subjective sense is the criterion behind "Red Flag" laws, most of which involve one party going to court and showing, with some level of evidence, that somebody is a danger to themselves or others, and that they should have firearms removed until the situation is ironed out. Which, especially in the case of many blue states, involves a very low threshold of evidence for very subjective claims, a hearing where the target is not present or represented, before a judge who may or may not have an agenda on gun rights issues, and a fairly opaque process for resolving the issue.
But one criterion that should be relaitvely objective, and reportable, is a prescription for psychoactive medication. The correlation between psychiatric drugs - anti-psychotics and antidrepressants - isn't quite as universal as some on the right claim, but the correlation is there:
The Violence Project’s analysis found that 24% of mass shooters had previously taken psychiatric medication. Again, to be clear: The vast majority of people prescribed antipsychotic drugs do not commit violent crimes. But it is still reasonable to create a temporary, reviewable pause of gun rights tied to active treatment with specified antipsychotics. To protect liberty and avoid stigma, the pause should be (1) time-limited, (2) rebuttable through a rapid petition or possibly through a physician’s attestation that the individual is not dangerous, and (3) privacy-respecting, relying on minimal, purpose-built reporting (or voluntary certificates) rather than broad disclosures of medical records.
All that - and some semblance of due process (the disqualifier behind most blue-state "red flag" laws, which involve no adversarial hearings and minimal standards of evidence to impose, plus official opacity and higher standards in response), and the fact that strong anti-psychotics are not presciibed willy-nilly (this isn't Adderall going out to Gen-Z code jockeys), and time limits and other procedural safeguards, could perhaps thread the needle between safety and preserving civil rights.
Which is why the left won't be interested in it.
