4th Cir.: Officers acted reasonably in taking from and keeping guns of plaintiff who threatened violence against others as a part of his own suicide

Plaintiff called a suicide hotline and said he would probably go to work at the fire department and take out others before shooting himself. Police were dispatched to his house and found him loading his car. They approached him with guns drawn and handcuffed him without incident. They searched his house and found a gun safe and every interior door locked and survivalist literature everywhere inside but the bathroom. They pressured him for keys and the combination and seized lots of guns. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital and left. He was not arrested, but his weapons were confiscated. Two years later, he sought return of the guns, and he did not get them back. He sued for the guns, but not over his own detention, and the officers were found to have acted reasonably. Mora v. City of Gaithersburg, 519 F.3d 216 (4th Cir. 2008). The first two paragraphs of the opinion give its tenor:

At Columbine High School in Littleton, in Blacksburg, Omaha, and Oklahoma City, America has had to learn how many victims the violence of just one or two outcasts can claim. These new predators are not terrorists in the ordinary sense; they are [*2] not linked to foreign powers or international organizations hostile to the United States. They are often isolated but heavily armed, filled to the brim with rage and anguish, and bent not just on murder, but on indiscriminate slaughter followed, frequently, by suicide. Violent derangement is nothing new, of course, but the atrocities seem to be growing at once more shocking and more commonplace.

This case presents the question of what emergency preventive action police may take, consistent with the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, when they learn of an individual who may well intend a similar slaughter, but who has neither committed nor attempted any crime. The legal issues are somewhat novel, and so we proceed with two values in mind: the need to prevent massacres whose human costs are beyond comprehension, and the need to preserve civil liberty for those who may be angry and depressed but not ultimately violent, and who cannot under our constitutional traditions be treated like criminals when they have committed no crime.