The Washington Navy Yard. The Tucson shooting. Everyone remembers the odd mug shot of the crazy joker--yes, he called himself The Joker--who dyed his hair red and shot up the movie theater in Aurora, Colo. Just this month, somebody with mental problems shot up an airport in Florida.
If Dylann Roof's trial in South Carolina proved anything, it was how crazy he was and is. A jury may have thought that, too, but judged him not exactly insane, legally, and sentenced him to death.
As our valued columnist Charles Krauthammer once put it, these crazies are being allowed to die with their rights on. That is, our betters decided decades ago to shut down all kinds of mental institutions, and send the vulnerable (and dangerous) out into the streets. Because it was the "humane" thing to do. All they had to do is take their meds. And they'd be free!
That is, all they had to do is self-medicate. Which many simply won't do. We've seen it first-hand. A man we knew in Texarkana decades ago was a class-A citizen and working taxpayer when he took his meds regularly. Without them, he could be found under overpasses, doing and thinking the strangest things. Two different people.
The closing down of so many mental institutions might have made the compassionate among us feel better about themselves, especially after watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest one late night. But it has done more harm than good. And not just to patients. See the victims of these mass shootings. And their families.
Too often the mentally ill, when they're noticed at all, are told to keep it down. Or take it down the road. What they rarely face these days, because of policy and room, is commitment. In this area, we need to return to the past. It would be progress.
Cruel? Not as cruel as leaving them to sleep under bridges, to run from their imaginations, to fight day and night against things that aren't there. To shoot up an airport or church or Navy Yard.
This is madness, literally. These people don't belong on the streets. For their good. And ours.
Editorial on 01/16/2017