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The Right to Bear Arms and Persons with Mental Illness

Kahler now joins several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that shape the contours of the insanity defense in the United States. In Kahler, the Court resisted setting a national standard for the insanity defense. While the dissent is quite effective in pointing out the historical and case law traditions that argue for a moral incapacity standard consistent with the Leland threshold, the majority comes to a different conclusion. Clearly, respecting a state’s rights to shape criminal law and procedure is consistent with a long line of previous Court decisions, yet Justice Breyer offers a vivid example that a psychotic man who has the delusional belief that a dog commands him to shoot another man will not have the protection of an insanity claim in Kansas, while the psychotic man who shoots another man who he believes to be a dog will benefit from the Kansas fashioning of the insanity defense. This example may trouble many who approach the insanity defense and understand mental illness from a clinical perspective. It is exceedingly rare that psychosis involves such a distortion of reality that a person actually has the delusion that another man is a dog. But many of us have observed delusional distortions, deific commands, and other psychotic perceptions that direct a person to act in a violent fashion, believing perversely that the act is morally justified. The phenomena of psychosis (i.e., its impact on reason, decision-making, emotion, perception, judgment, restraint, behavior, and rationality itself) all were notably absent in this decision.