The Social Security Administration Shouldn’t Be Deciding Who’s Too “Mentally Defective” to Own a Gun
Unable to legislate new restrictions on what kind of arms can be sold, the government has embarked on a long-term effort of adding an untold number of Americans to “no buy” lists—based on the unfounded conjecture that they pose a “danger” to others—and deprive them of a fundamental constitutional right. The Gun Control Act of 1968 and NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 requires that agencies with pertinent records on who is or is not “a mental defective” disclose those records to the attorney general so those people can be excluded from purchasing arms through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has proposed a new regulation that would create a process for transferring the records of those who seek a “representative payee” (legal proxy) under Social Security disability benefits programs to NICS, so that they may be considered a “mental defective” and thus lose their Second Amendment rights. The proposed SSA rule is arbitrary—there’s no evidence that someone who needs help with SSA paperwork can’t be trusted with a gun—and inconsistent with the regulatory and statutory scheme, not to mention blatantly unconstitutional.
Accordingly, for the first time ever, Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies, with the help of law professors Josh Blackman and Gregory Wallace, has filed a public comment objecting to the rule on 10 different grounds. No one disputes that the government has an interest in keeping guns out of the hands of those who could harm themselves or others, but depriving a constitutional right requires due process of law. Under existing law, the root requirement of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause is that an individual receive a hearing before she is deprived of a constitutional right by a federal agency, one where the government must justify its restriction.
Here, the process entails an SSA bureaucrat making the determination without the expertise necessary to tell if the applicant is a danger to herself or others and without necessarily having the benefit of medical evidence. Indeed, the criterion evaluated—whether a person is “a mental defective”—is the same unscientific and unspecific standard that the Supreme Court approved in 1927 when legalizing the sterilization of the mentally ill and other eugenic treatments. The term is antiquated and vague.
Moreover, it is unconstitutional to condition the receipt of benefits on the sacrifice of rights. The “condition” here could not be more clear: to gain or maintain a representative payee, needy disabled persons must submit to being placed on the NICS list and foregoing their Second Amendment rights. The government is not allowed to foist that Catch-22 onto those who qualify for Social Security disability but need help administering their benefits.
On a more practical level, the SSA is not the agency that should be making this sweeping policy. Determining whether someone satisfies the criteria for obtaining a representative payee is perfectly within SSA’s expertise, but determining who among its recipients is capable of responsible firearm ownership is far, far afield of the SSA’s area of expertise. The SSA’s job is to administer social-insurance benefits, not to implement gun-safety regulations. The agency is simply not staffed with the medical and gun-policy experts necessary to make such determinations on a regular basis.
Finally, the proposed rule treats the entire category of people who express a misgiving about their mental abilities as per se deprived of their right to armed self-defense. Surely the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which confirmed the individual right to keep and bear arms, did not mean to sweep every hypochondriac, arachnophobiac (spiders), coulrophobiac (clowns), or lepidopterophobiac (butterflies) into the federal mental-health gun-prohibition.
The SSA should abandon this ill-devised rule.
