Minnesota justices question reach of gun ban for those deemed ‘mental defective’

MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — The Minnesota Supreme Court grappled Thursday with whether a decades-old federal firearm prohibition for those found mentally incompetent can be applied to a man whose civil commitment was never carried out.

The case deals with a single, disputed phrase Congress adopted in passing the Gun Control Act of 1968. “Adjudicated as a mental defective,” in the statute, defines a person prohibited from possessing a firearm due to court-determined danger to self or others — a phrase Randy Dale Sixta claims he does not fall under.

Seven years after Lincoln County sheriff’s deputies found Sixta with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest and a suicide note, he is now fighting to restore his Second Amendment rights.

While Sixta followed a court-ordered treatment plan that resulted in his civil commitment being stayed and eventually dismissed, the county maintains the mere finding of mental illness in 2019 — regardless of Sixta’s successful rehabilitation — triggers a federal regulation permanently barring him from owning a firearm.

Sixta told the Minnesota Supreme Court he should not lose his firearm rights because his commitment was put on hold and he took the necessary steps to seek help and improve his mental illness — claiming the phrase was intended to prohibit those with permanent mental deficiencies.

Chief Justice Natalie Hudson appeared sympathetic to the concern that people who experience acute but treatable crises could face lifelong consequences.

“Mr. Sixta, according to his own position at the time of the hearing, had dealt with his significant depression, had dealt with his mental illness issues, had dealt with the marital issues, had dealt with all of the things that led him to attempt suicide,” she said. “What more do we want people to do?”

Justice Gordon Moore voiced a similar worry about what the county’s interpretation signals to people considering treatment.

“What if we had two individuals, one was adjudicated mentally ill because of a brief but intense psychotic episode that resulted in an actual commitment, and another that’s got years of persistent and chronic mental illness but has never been formally adjudicated,” he asked. “Does that provide a disincentive for people to get mental health treatment?”

Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Morgan Alexander, arguing for the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, countered that situations like Sixta’s are rare because the conduct must be severe enough to require court intervention.

“There needs to be a finding of clear and convincing evidence that this person not only meets the statutory definition of a person who poses risk of harm due to mental illness but also that they pose a substantial likelihood of harm,” Alexander said.

Despite Congress adopting the phrase “adjudicated as a mental defective,” it largely left interpretation of the term up to federal agencies and judiciaries, leading the justices to press both sides on how the court should handle its own understanding of the key phrase.

Sixta’s attorney, Zachary Webster, urged the court to follow a 1973 Eighth Circuit decision, which narrowly construed the phrase to mean someone who never possessed normal intellectual capacity — a persistent, severe cognitive impairment distinct from ordinary mental illness.

“We need to weigh that with regard to a person’s Second Amendment rights,” Webster said, arguing his client cannot possibly be considered to have a permanent impairment after successful treatment. “We can’t just take them away because we had one finding.”

Webster, of Birkholz & Associates LLC, said a stayed civil commitment based on a discrete crisis should not qualify as the kind of final adjudication that triggers a lifelong federal gun ban.

The county, however, pressed the court to align itself with a much broader definition long used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which treats “adjudicated as a mental defective” as anyone with a mental illness who has been judicially found dangerous regardless of treatment.

Justice Paul Thissen signaled the court could not simply lean on generalized safety concerns without constitutional rights.

“It doesn’t strike me that we could just say, well, it’s good public policy, it’s good for public safety to limit how many people have guns,” he said. “That’s just too general a policy in the Constitution.”

Webster argued even the ATF is reconsidering its stance. A proposed federal rule, he said, appears to narrow the definition in a way that would exclude people like Sixta, reinforcing his argument that courts shouldn’t outsource legal interpretation to an agency with changing regulations.

“We shouldn’t be relying on the ATF or the executive branch of the federal government to interpret our laws,” Webster said. “We should be relying on the actual statute itself and our own canons of interpretation because that’s what justices are for.”

Still, several justices focused on the need to keep Minnesota’s permitting system aligned with federal law, questioning how far the court could go in narrowing a federal firearms prohibition that still exists in Congress.

“If the federal government prohibits you from having a firearm, we’re not going to issue a permit,” Thissen said. “If they change their mind, and it’s not … then someone should be able to get the permit.”