Using Medicalization to Suppress the Exercise of First Amendment Rights

A repugnant tactic of authoritarianism is categorizing people’s desire for or exercise of freedom as illness that government should suppress. An example of this was the deeming of dissidents in the Soviet Union as mentally ill to justify their detention and punishment.

In America, there has long been resistance against an effort to similarly have the United States government medicalize the exercise of gun rights as a means to circumvent the constitutional protection of the right to bear arms con...