Authorities: Robert Card Was Not Involuntarily Committed, Therefore Not Barred From Passing Firearm Background Check

Maine Commissioner of Public Safety Mike Sauschuck indicated during a Saturday morning press conference that Maine shooting suspect Robert Card was never involuntarily committed for mental health issues and was therefore not barred from passing a firearm background check.

Breitbart News reported that police took Card for an evaluation at a hospital while he was at West Point in mid-July 2023, and this raised questions of why Maine’s yellow flag law was not triggered.

Two relevant questions are 1) Did Card’s mental evaluation at a West Point hospital in mid-July 2023 not reach the level of an involuntary commitment? or 2) Did someone drop the ball in reporting an involuntary commitment to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS)  to prevent passage of a background check?

On Saturday morning Sauschuck clarified that undergoing an evaluation is not the same thing as being involuntary committed.

He said, “You can volunteer for treatment for months on end, but if you’re not forcibly committed to seek that treatment–and it’s very specific to treatment,” then it does not qualify as being involuntarily committed.

Sauschuck added, “In this scenario, I have not seen to this point that Mr. Card was forcibly committed for treatment. And if that didn’t happen, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) check, you go into a firearms dealer who does all their work, and the background check is not going to ping that this individual is prohibited.”

He stressed, “Just because there appears to be a mental health nexus to this scenario, the vast, vast, vast majority of people with a mental health diagnosis will never hurt anybody.”

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.