From X-RMN agent Maryhrt:

Snip

Don Hall and his girlfriend were sitting in their living room earlier this year when they noticed police lights flashing outside the couple’s upstate New York home.

When the 70-year-old Army veteran greeted Oneida County sheriff’s deputies he was given a document saying that Hall had to hand over his six guns – four long guns and two pistols -- to law enforcement because he had been deemed “mentally defective.”

Shocked, Hall told the police he had no history of mental issues. The deputies asserted that he must have triggered the order under New York state’s Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, and then the officers left with his guns.

“I’ve never been in trouble in my whole life and never done anything" to warrant this.

The so-called SAFE Act, which was implemented in 2013 in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, includes a provision that allows heath care providers to report patients that they think may be a risk to themselves or others.

In Hall’s case, however, the sheriff’s deputies were wrong. He hadn’t triggered an order under the SAFE Act.

New York’s Office of Mental Health found that Hall’s case originated with a report to the system set up under the federal government’s Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act – a law that includes a provision making it mandatory that a hospital or other medical facility report anyone who is involuntarily committed or has been ruled mentally defective by a court or similar legal body.

Hall hired a lawyer and – after receiving a number of affidavits proving he hadn’t been treated for mental illness – convinced a judge that a hospital worker must have confused him with someone else and got his guns back.

Hall’s plight is just one of a number of cases across the U.S. where provisions in federal and state laws meant to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people and criminals have actually led to mistaken seizures of weapons by law enforcement.