The press is full of reports about a mass shooting at a Florida school. Another “known wolf” - embittered and feeling he has nothing left to lose - kills 17. As usual, the legacy media strikes up the gun control refrain. America doesn’t have a gun control problem, it has a failure to incarcerate the insane problem.
Ugly as mass shootings undoubtedly are, imagine how many of the mental walking wounded aren’t quite ready or organized enough yet to make it happen, but want to or fantasize about it. That’s really frightening. We see them around us nearly daily, talking to themselves, moving semi-aimlessly, engaging in so-called “self-stims,” acting inappropriately, self-destructively.
COTTonLINE has written of this problem before. Liberals want people free to be “different” and “different” people to be free. Conservatives don’t want to spend billions on mental hospitals. Colluding together, they effectively decided to let people with broken minds go their own ways until they hurt someone, at which point they may get locked up in a jail or prison.
Most of the time this “works” if you don’t count the misery of desperate foggy minds living rough under bridges and in cardboard boxes, self-medicating with cheap wine and street drugs, perhaps freezing to death. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and bystanders get hurt or dead. When the number of collateral victims is large, we see it in the national news. When there are just 2-3 victims it only makes the local news.
Society made this choice when we shut down the mental hospitals, decades ago. Whether or not we understood at the time all the ramifications of what we were agreeing to is a different question.
Deinstitutionalization is a drug to which our society is addicted. It is hard to imagine us going back, getting clean, taking the people with mental problems off the streets and into protective custody.
The issue might be guns ... but only if you take as given that people have the right to be nuttier than squirrel poo and yet remain at liberty. COTTonLINE doesn’t accept this as a “right.”
