HONOLULU, HAWAII — Imagine if you needed a doctor’s note to have basic civil liberties like the right to speak your mind or the right to not be searched without probable cause. Hawaii residents are having to go through a similar inane hoop in order to get their permits to carry. As Hawaii News Now documented, it’s extremely hard to get a prescription for 2A.
Honolulu police officers are now handing out a memo to gun permit applicants requiring them to have a doctor sign off, on official letterhead, that the applicant “shall own, possess, or control any firearm or ammunition and has been medically documented to be no longer adversely affected by the addiction, abuse, dependence, mental disease, disorder or defect.”
“It’s some kind of new legal mumbo jumbo about I have to admit that I was treated for mental or drug abuse which I have never done, so that would be a lie. Kaiser says they won’t do it so you have to seek an outside doctor. I did so, and they [HPD] did not accept that doctor’s letter,” [one applicant] said.
The problem? Most health insurers won’t cover this sort of medical visit and many physicians won’t sign off on that sort of all-encompassing legal jargon. From a legal standpoint, it places the doctor directly at risk if he signs a note using his medical authority as its backing. Not only that — he’s being forced to be involved in a process that he would not normally give his consent.
What type of lunacy is this?!
Honolulu government officials seem to know this is the case and take some sort of sick relish in the fact that a person has to jeopardize the career of a healthcare professional and himself in order to obtain what amounts to a basic human right in the majority of the rest of the country.
One major health insurer, Kaiser Permanente, is even going further that while it is required to release medical information to the Honolulu Police Department, it doesn’t have to require doctors to give their own medical clearance.
Their comment?
“The police department is the only organization who can evaluate an individual’s fitness to acquire or own a firearm. Health care organizations/providers do not make these evaluations,” the statement from Kaiser explained.
While many are suggesting skirting the issue by lying about whether or not an applicant has health insurance, this is in fact forcing law-abiding gun owners into the precarious gray area of having to lie in order to do what they legally ought to be able to do anyway.
So, in the land of sunshine and tropical beaches, there’s still some much needed improvements that have to happen in order to make it a basic democracy… Inside the United States of America, no less, and targeting veterans and other law-abiding citizens wishing nothing more than to defend their basic rights to self-preservation. Disgraceful.