Matt Bai: Guns, Congress and Murphy’s Law
Politics
Matt Bai: Guns, Congress and Murphy’s Law
You probably hadn’t heard of Tim Murphy before last week, even if you follow politics pretty closely. Suddenly, though, Murphy, a Republican congressman from the Pittsburgh area, is on virtually every network all because he has devoted the past few years of his life to writing an arcane, 153-page bill, the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, known familiarly in the Capitol by its bill number, 2646. It has, so far, gone exactly nowhere in Congress and may well die there, writes Yahoo News political columnist Matt Bai. Among it’s provisions, Murphy’s bill would amend the existing federal privacy laws, so that in cases of serious mental illness, a consulting doctor would have the ability to call the patient’s parent or caregiver and share information about medications and follow-up treatment.
It’s fair to say that it would give doctors, judges, families and schools more tools to work with when they come in contact with a severely disturbed kid who might be armed.
Matt Bai, Yahoo News political columnist
But while more than a dozen lawmakers have signed on to Murphy’s bill since the most recent mass shooting just last week (he has, at last count, 97 Republican co-sponsors and 40 Democrats), 2646 may well remain stuck in the purgatory of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Republicans are generally wary of any bill that expands the reach of government and the White House — which could be jumping on this bill as a consensus measure to address the shootings — doesn’t want to do anything that might be seen as blaming mental illness, rather than blaming the gun.
So the sad fact is that a sensible bill that actually might begin to do something about this sickening entanglement of guns and delusion has about as much chance of reaching the president’s desk as we do of getting through the next six months without another classroom slaughter.
Matt Bai
