Call me cynical. With the election over, all the chattering classes haven’t had anything to do. They will try to ride this horse for months to come; trying to make themselves relevant. All on the bodies of dead children and the hearts of grieving parents.

You nailed this one.

Well researched and on the money. But your last comment about weapons and police will never fly. Particularly when Homeland Security is run by the law enforcement community.

Spot on.

One legitimate place that USGOV and the states could and should put healthcare money is in the mental health arena. During the Reagan presidency, the government de-funded mental hospitals and turned the vast majority of the crazies onto the street to become “modern homeless”.

The Anaheim (CA) Police Department set a very forward thinking program in motion in the 1980’s wherein police officers would visit the homes of people judged “likely to create problems” due to their violent mental instability. Trained SWAT members would do a write up on what they could determine on the interior of the home, the neighborhood and on the person – people to contact and points that the team and negotiators would need in the event that the train came off the rails. Neighbors were interviewed.

It wasn’t a lot of work, even in a city of 320,000, there aren’t that many loons – but everyone in a given neighborhood knows who they are. Police reports were flagged by SWAT Eval follow-up and that’s where the leads came from. Eventually the number of evaluated people swelled to about 100. Not many. However those same people were those who caused about 98% of the problems. In a crisis situation, investigators could pull the package and see what had been done, shortcutting problems.

Additionally, PROACTIVE police conduct (with mandatory semi-anual contact to keep the files fresh) tended to shortcut difficulties. The nut-jobs knew that the police were paying attention to them. (and attention is what these school killers all want)

Police work is not just about issuing traffic citations and herding drunks – though that’s important too. It’s about using your head to try and decide where the problems will be coming from.

I’m sure that liberals would howl about unspecified “rights”, but the meetings with the police were all low key, non threatening and consensual. It wasn’t about brow beating the mentally unstable. It was a genuine eval with resources available if the people were in crisis.

I don’t know if that sort of program would have averted a disaster such as Sandy Hook, but it might have. And it didn’t require heavy federal funding. Just two officer’s time – maybe four or five hours each week contacting people who needed to be seen.

No change in gun laws will bring any change whatsoever, as you noted. They’ll just try to punish the rest of us, instead. Only this time, the answer is “NO.”

LL:

One reason teh government defunded mental hospitals in the 1980s were the court cases in the 1970s that set a LOT of patients free.

That was due to a combination of the idea that someone not ACTIVELY hurting anyone while under 24/7 observation and forced to take antipsychotics was obviously “safe” (after all, nice Dr. Lecter hasn’t eaten anyone’s face since he started his meds, right?) and the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest, a film based on a novel loosely based on the barbaric conditions in a particular mental hospital during the 1930’s, 1940’s, and very early 1950’s . . .

As a point of interest, almost every school in Israel has an armed guard at the entry–as do our stores, malls, etc. The children are not afraid because the armed guard/soldier/police are what keeps them safe. I, like most Israelis like to bring a drink, pizza slice or treat for the guy/girl at the gate, because we appreciate them–and they do prevent terror.

Wow – AOA’s post was exactly on point, as is yours. As AOA said, if this guy was going to break 40+ laws, how would one more have stopped him?

Add to that the frenzy that the entire country is in now – how can we even have a good thoughtful conversation?

NFO —

I agree. What we need is lunatic control, not gun control.

It’s just the same as it should be for felons —

If you are NOT safe enough to be allowed to go without extra restraints in free society, you should not be free, period.

Mental patients have a different issue, though — some can be quite trustworthy, provided they stay on their meds.

Unfortunately, patients who NEED particular medicines to stay sane, yet dislike the effects of those medicines have a very high rate of noncompliance. Thus, we may have to mandate that their DAILY compliance be monitored (i.e., your doctor or a social worker watches you take your pills). Don’t like society ensuring you take your sanity pills? You don’t get to live in society, then.

This kid presents a different story. As near as I can tell, he was a high-functioning autism patient who fell into the total social isolation end of the spectrum. His disability was severe enough he could not be self sufficient in society, could not bond to people, and could not be trusted alone for even a minute (in his mother’s own words).

He should have been institutionalized. But, we try to mainstream EVERYONE, we have people saying that severe mental disabilities are not “disabilities” society needs to deal with, but laudable “differences” we should celebrate, and we have fewer mental hospital beds per capita than any point since 1850, despite being much better at identifying people with mental defects much better.

Again, it comes down to a highly acclaimed counterculture movie (obsolete in terms of medical treatment by the time it came out, and frankly a pretty crappy movie at that), based on a book written by a guy who was taking heavy doses of hallucinogenic drugs at the time of his “research” (stoned on LSD, peyote, etc., while working as a midnight orderly in a state veteran’s hospital), where the entire book takes place from the point of view of a schizophrenic.

I’m not surprised that someone taking drugs that duplicate schizophrenia would sympathize with clinical schizophrenics while we was tripping.

Keep in mind that the author (Ken Kesey) made his entire career attacking society and “The Man”, blithly assuming that any major societal institution was an instrument of oppression (such as mental hospitals and psychiatry).

he’s Nomber Two on my list of “countercultural heros whose books destroyed millions of lives through lies”, right behind Rachel Carson. (Ms. Carson wins out only because her work resulted in the actual deaths of literally millions of innocent people. . . but since they were all poor brown people in Third World countries, “progressives” don’t actually care about them. Kesey has only accounted for a few thousand deaths, and hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives.)

Any time there is a “crisis” the liberals take the opportunity to advance their agenda under the guise of “solving the problem”.

You’re right about schools not having money for psychiatric services. My daughter is doing a social worker internship in a school system near where we live. She’s doing the internship because the school system only has money for one psychologist, not any social workers.

Mental health treatment in this country has been a disgrace since the deinstitutionalization movement started in the early 60s. It’s much cheaper to drug people with mental health problems than to try to cure them.

Of course they mostly can’t be forced to take their medications, so that’s even cheaper still.

Hello. And Bye. Thank you very much.