A divided federal appeals court ruled that a decades-old federal law indefinitely banning people committed to mental health treatment from owning a gun could violate the Second Amendment.
The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday revived a lawsuit filed by a Michigan man who failed a background check while attempting to buy a gun in 2011. Clifford C. Tyler had been committed to a mental institution 25 years earlier but since has received a clean bill of health.
Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, writing for the Sixth Circuit majority, said government lawyers offered compelling evidence for prohibiting people currently or recently suffering from mental illness from possessing a gun. That evidence included the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, committed by a student whom a court had ordered into outpatient treatment.
But, she wrote, “none of the government’s evidence squarely answers the key question at the heart of this case: Is it reasonably necessary to forever bar all previously institutionalized persons from owning a firearm?”
Mr. Tyler sued the U.S. attorney general and his local sheriff in Hillsdale County, Mich., in 2012, alleging that the Gun Control Act of 1968 effectively created a permanent ban on his Second Amendment rights. A federal trial court dismissed his lawsuit, and Mr. Tyler appealed to the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit.
The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday revived a lawsuit filed by a Michigan man who failed a background check while attempting to buy a gun in 2011. Clifford C. Tyler had been committed to a mental institution 25 years earlier but since has received a clean bill of health.
Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, writing for the Sixth Circuit majority, said government lawyers offered compelling evidence for prohibiting people currently or recently suffering from mental illness from possessing a gun. That evidence included the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, committed by a student whom a court had ordered into outpatient treatment.
But, she wrote, “none of the government’s evidence squarely answers the key question at the heart of this case: Is it reasonably necessary to forever bar all previously institutionalized persons from owning a firearm?”
Mr. Tyler sued the U.S. attorney general and his local sheriff in Hillsdale County, Mich., in 2012, alleging that the Gun Control Act of 1968 effectively created a permanent ban on his Second Amendment rights. A federal trial court dismissed his lawsuit, and Mr. Tyler appealed to the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit.
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