Privacy-protecting gun advocates proposed invasive surveillance of mentally ill people

Evidence

Given his organization’s staunch opposition to a national gun registry on privacy grounds, the proposal to invade the privacy of people with mental illness is the height of hypocrisy. An overwhelming majority of the mentally ill are nonviolent; many of them do not own guns and have no intention of buying any. Moreover, a good number of them may be proponents of banning guns altogether. There is a marked difference between requiring individuals who want to buy guns to undergo background checks and listing individuals on a national registry as mentally ill who are not seeking to buy guns. This Orwellian scheme violates people’s privacy rights for the sake of shifting attention away from guns of mass destruction to mental illness. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1273

Categorization

• XREF: LaPierre’s registry proposal parallels how moral panics scapegoat marginalized groups while protecting in-group privileges.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1273