Via NY Post:
Can we please stop holding the country hostage to crazy people?
Every year a tiny number of mentally ill people go on horrific killing sprees. It just happened in California. (I won’t name the person because I think the media attention lavished on these horror shows encourages some of these young men — and they are almost all young men — to seek fame or validation through bloodshed.)
In an entirely human response, we get spun up into a frenzy of finger-pointing. In the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, many of the country’s leading journalists and politicians suggested the former congresswoman was shot because of the “violent” political rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann and other Tea Party-affiliated politicians. It was beyond stupid and slanderous. It was also utterly devoid of evidence. (The culprit was a severe paranoid schizophrenic who abused drugs.)
One coda to Jonah’s article. Of course, you want to do what you can to stop violent mentally ill people from obtaining weapons. By far too much attention has been spent trying to restrict the rights of those who don’t fall into that category.
But who falls into that category can sometimes be a challenging question.
Sometimes it’s obvious. Like it should have been obvious with this killer in Santa Barbara, as he made threats, the police were informed. But they did nothing to look at the videos, did nothing to check to see if the killer had weapons. If that is all true, this was an easily preventable tragedy.
Not everything is that simple. Often there may be some indications of mental illness but not necessarily of the violence to come. Should we remove the right from every mentally ill person? Who qualifies as ‘mentally ill’? Who makes that determination? Can you ever undo that determination?
Because it is challenging, and maybe not even completely possible to always address these questions even if you do create laws to properly address the mentally ill, politicians often opt for simple feel-good solutions. But that doesn’t actually do anything…