In the past several years, the United States has seen a long string of mass-murder shootings.

In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people and wounded 17 in the massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

In 2009, we saw the deadly shootings at the U.S. military installation at Fort Hood, where a single gunman killed 13 people and wounded 29 others.
In 2011, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with at least 17 others outside a constituents meeting.

In 2012, a man shot and killed 12 people and wounded 38 others at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. We also saw the murder of six people and the wounding of three at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

Finally, this string of massacres has culminated in the most recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where Adam Lanza murdered his mother, 20 children and six adult staff members.

The shootings at Columbine High School broke our country, but this long string of similar massacres in recent memory is unsettlingly desensitizing. The cycle is always the same. The news of the tragedy breaks; we mourn and watch the candlelight vigils and funerals on TV; we say kind words to each other. For a time, there will be stirrings in Congress and in our state legislatures about tightening gun control laws and closing the gaps in our broken mental health system.

Then after a while, the conversation dies down  because there is only so much regulative legislation that can be passed before the real issue that no one wants to address is drawn-the banning of all firearms altogether. Everyone but the survivors of the massacre and the friends and families of the victims settle back comfortably into their daily routines. Once we have almost forgotten, then the cycle begins again.

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, we are currently embroiled in the discussion about gun control and the mental health system, specifically how we can tighten gun laws to prevent those deemed dangerous from obtaining a firearm.

According to a Jan. 15 New York Times article, New York State legislators have passed a gun bill that requires therapists to report any client they find "likely to engage in" violent behavior to the authorities.

Once this report is made, any weapons the client owns would be confiscated, and the report would appear in federal background checks on the client to prevent them from obtaining new weapons.

The new bill widens the net of people who cannot obtain guns, so it seems like a step in the right direction for preventing future massacres through gun control. But with its implications for the privacy and integrity of mental health patients, this bill and others like it are actually a great step back.

Where therapists once had the very specific requirements of involuntary hospitalizations and direct threats of violence for reporting clients to the authorities, they must now work with the requirement to report any person who "is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others," which is a larger category of people and also considerably more vague.

Links have indeed been made between mental illness and violent behavior. However, therapists are trained to diagnose those illnesses, not predict behaviors that might result from them. And since every patient manifests mental illness a little bit differently, it would be quite impossible to create some kind of reliable diagnostic scale of behavior that would make the requirements for reporting clients more scientific and specific. Thus, this new bill is asking therapists to make a personal judgment call about the "likely" behavior of their clients which, no matter how knowledgeable and experienced the therapist is, may or may not prove to be true.

The vagueness of this new reporting requirement and the fact that it rests almost entirely upon a judgment call does not mean that I think we should be allowing actually violent individuals to have guns. I do believe however, that in reporting anyone to the authorities on such flimsy grounds, we are violating that person's constitutional right to privacy. Once these reports of likely violent behavior are sent to the federal authorities, they will follow the person around for the rest of their life, not just in their attempts to buy guns, but also in their attempts to find work, travel to certain parts of the world, adopt children or access certain privileged research data. For those who are actually ill and in need of treatment, a federal record of the illness means further, damaging stigma.

For those who never actually do engage in violent behavior, or who are able to make a recovery, a federal record of "likely" violent behavior is an unreasonable barrier to freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Either way, the fear of these kinds of restrictions on one's freedom could prevent people in both categories from seeking the psychiatric care they might really need.

The situation is dire and we need to find a way to prevent more of these kinds of mass-murder shootings from happening, but stigmatizing and violating the privacy of psychiatric patients is not the way to do it.

If we value the right to bear arms so much that we are willing to sacrifice the privacy and integrity of the nation's ill in order to keep that right, then perhaps we also value the right to bear arms more than the lives of those that have been lost and will continue to be lost in these massacres.
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