About 278 licensed gun owners might lose possession of their weapons since New York State's tough new SAFE Act gun control law has flagged them to be mentally unstable, according to a new report.
Immediately after the 2012 mass shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., Gov. Andrew Cuomo had urged lawmakers to pass the SAFE Act, The Syracuse Post-Standard reported.
Since the law's enactment in March 2013, psychiatrists and health professionals have collected 38,718 names in a database of individuals who have been deemed at-risk for owning guns and harming others, with 737 of them from Central New York.
Additionally, less than 1 percent, about 278 matches, in the mental health reports statewide involved people with pistol permits.
For the gun control law to be able to confiscate weapons from the 278 individuals, judges will have to sign off on the suspensions and confiscations of the gun owners, according to Fox News. The accused will then be given a chance to challenge the order for loss of their permit and weapons.
After filing a Freedom of Information Law request, the paper obtained a county-by-county breakdown from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, with Monroe County having the most matches at 36, followed by Westchester, 17, Suffolk, 16 and Dutchess, 14.
At least one permit holder whose name was in the database has had their gun confiscated by the police, Cortland County Clerk Elizabeth Larkin told the Post-Standard.
"We had another man who came in and voluntarily handed us his permit and gave his weapons to the police and said, 'I don't want them anymore,'" Larkin said.
However, individuals who have had their permits suspended and guns confiscated were not included in the database's tally, the paper reported, adding that all names in the database would remain confidential.
For some mental health providers and patient advocates, the size of the database is extremely disturbing.
"It's bigger than I thought," Harvey Rosenthal, executive director of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services in Albany, told the Post-Standard. "It sends a message to those who might need care that there are a lot of people who are going to be in a database."
But gun control advocates argue that the number of names in the database is small compared to the size of the state's population, which is 20 million.
"It only takes one individual to wreak mayhem and tragedy if they have access to a firearm," Leah Gunn Barrett, of the group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, said. "These are individuals who, under no circumstances, should have guns."
