For a mentally ill person, should citizenship have an asterisk where guns are concerned?

To even begin this essay, I’m going to have to admit something uncomfortable. I am mentally ill. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’m one of hundreds of thousands of Americans with a tough-to-treat, life-affecting neurosis known as obsessivecompulsive disorder.

Since I happen to live near a leading psychiatric hospital, I’m one of the lucky ones. I got diagnosed as a young man. I visit my psychiatrist regularly, and take a medication at the beginning of every day. Thanks to all of the above, I’m in the “functional” category. I have a family. I work for a living (though I don’t earn very much). I even own a home.

Much of the mental illness I live with is internal, involving repetitive actions and thoughts that are nearly impossible to control. But it’s something that is hard to hide. Do I exhibit symptoms? My wife would say yes. And here’s a confession: Some of these involve episodes of anger.

If I polled my friends, most of whom have no idea I am ill, I would get different answers. Some might say I was more or less normal. Some would call me a crank. Some, maybe, worse. At least one of my neighbors, I’ll bet, thinks I have serious problems — especially after our verbal battles over some trees he cut down.

As it happens, I have no interest in owning a gun. But, what if I did? What if I felt one were necessary to protect my property, my family, or myself ? Should you and the rest of society step in to stop me? In the debate following the Parkland shooting, there are many — including the president, gun ownership advocates and even moderates in Congress — who believe so.

If you agree, I have to ask you: Just how will you go about this? By some edict from my doctor? Even if he were inclined to sign one, which I doubt, do you not realize that I could find another to refute him — one of many psychiatrists with broadly liberal views?

You see, unless your sense of the field was formed in the 1940s, you’ll realize that the idea of stripping rights from the mentally ill is a very slippery slope. Rarely are we sufferers restrained or “locked up” nowadays unless we’ve harmed ourselves or others. Want to label a few of us as “dangerous?” We’re just as hard to decipher and diagnose as anyone you know.

Those, like me, who suffer from mental illness come in millions of degrees of severity and functionality. Experts these days talk not about patients with autism, but about patients on the “autism spectrum.” Is there an “obsessivecompulsive spectrum” too? A spectrum for every disorder? I’ve little evidence for this, but I’m guessing there might be.

But back to my gun. Remember that you wouldn’t have known I exist, or that I have possibly worrisome issues, if I hadn’t outed myself by writing this. Just how many “me’s” are out there? It’s impossible to know.

Perhaps you could sit down with my nervous neighbor and make your case in court. You could get an injunction. Prevent me from buying a firearm — and make other restrictions on my actions, too. But unless I’m wrong, I’d have my day in court. My months in court. My case, in truth, could take years.

And, when push comes to shove: Is this not the way it should be? Does this not reflect the personal freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution and in the Bill of Rights, the very same documents Second Amendment advocates like to wave around?

Whatever your views on guns, or on people like me with mental illness, I am urging you to be consistent. Rights are rights. Protections are protections.

I’m hoping against hope that you agree.