Your friends shouldn't be making any hay with this. VA Tech was a gun free campus. They took a student to court last year for legally carrying with a CCL on campus and won. The VA legislature made a law (or the VA courts ruled, I don't know which) that the university could ban guns on campus. They were quite proud and happy about it. They made sure no one could defend themselves.
Ask them if they could wave a wand and make all guns in the U.S. disappear and make them illegal how many weeks would it take for the black market to bring a million guns back in? And who would have them all then? Only criminals and they would know that no one BUT criminals had them.
I don't know if that would faze them but that's what I think of asking them. There is also the issue of not hospitalizing the insane as we used to. I don't know the details of that either but it was about 30 or 40 years ago and it regarded their civil rights not to be deprived of liberty against their will. That goes hand-in-hand with the privacy laws to prevent the courts and society from protecting ourselves from lunatics.
The argument goes that depriving them of some rights is wrong but if they are mentally ill they should be deprived of the right to own a gun and that gun control measures should be tightened.
1. Not to pick nits, but the statute's acronym is 'HIPAA' ("HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 1996").
2. HIPAA is a thing from the Clinton Administration.
3. Liberals were furious that HIPAA's privacy policy didn't go far enough when the Patriot Act actually provided a clause where the government spooks could examine someone's medical records for national security reasons. I can find lots of web pages demonstrating this liberal outrage by Googling 'HIPAA Outrage'.
4. Conservatives were angry about HIPAA because we expected that it would prevent businesses from declining to hire a food service worker with Hepatitis or schoolteachers with AIDS or airline pilots with epilepsy, or whatever. Liberals celebrated that and thought it didn't go far enough.
5. I am pretty sure that there is at least one thread in the FR archives from around 1998 or so where we were talking about HIPAA and remarked that 'Just wait until some whackjob who should be denied a handgun under the Brady Bill gets one anyway because of medical confidentiality laws'.
5. My sentiments exactly, TigersEye: Up yours, Fineman, you four-eyed nerdface.