Honestly, I am floored by the reaction to this shooting.
Yes, it was tragic and horrible. Yes, we should be making sure we are going what we can to address this kind of problem.
But Shodan’s argument about cost vs. benefit is right on target.
Several people were shot by a crazed lunatic. How common is this? I don’t even need to do a risk assessment on this this to know that it is not something we need to spend more resources on.
Do you have any idea how many children are killed every year in street violence? In crimes that have clear answers?
We can’t get women to stop having children when they have no visible means of support. We can’t convenience teenagers that street violence is wrong. We can’t convenience parents to put the effort in to raise their children properly. This goes on with all races and classes, and we haven’t found any solution to it yet. The idea that we can now move on to “solving” the problem of crazed lunatics and are willing to debate forced psychiatric screening once a year is mind boggling.
It seems like a lot of people are more comfortable debating something like this because it’s so uncommon, there’s nothing real at stake. The hand-up versus and-out debate is too scary, so let’s spend resources dealing with a once in a lifetime event.
I have to side with Bricker and Shodan. I would love to see some true genius come up with a good solution that has no risk of incarcerating, committing or drugging anyone who should not be, and yet “catches” all those who really do need all that. I don’t think there will be a good answer in our lifetimes, or ever. If involuntary commitment becomes too easy, that is a whole new bunch of horror stories waiting to happen.
Conservative or liberal has nothing to do with it.
Then there will always be That Guy. "He was such a nice friendly man, polite, cheerful, helpful. Right up until he snapped and killed the entire village. " How do you catch him? You can’t.
You can never have a way to catch all the dangerous crazies, and still guarantee the rights of all the rest of the people. You just can’t.
That’s a good post and they’re all good arguments, although the benefits are not just ‘if we do this, crazy people won’t shoot up grocery stores.’ That’s like the argument you sometimes see that the U.S. should commit more aid to developing countries because otherwise poor countries will produce terrorists. It’s an oversimplification and a bad argument; the poor and the mentally ill are not holding everybody else hostage with the threat of becoming terrorists or mass shooters. We do know this guy was going off the rails for a long time, to the point people were aware of it, and nothing of consequence happened. We know that’s not a unique situation. So what could realistically be done about that?
We don’t know what signs there were to see from their perspective. He was arrested for having drug paraphernalia in 2007 but it was a misdemeanor and not a sign of mental illness. They reportedly were sent to the family home on other occasions, but we don’t know why or if he was involved.
Have a police officer (whose job it is to protect), a judge (whose job it is apply the law), and a mental health professional (whose has the professional credentials to determine the necessity of further examination/committment) examine the cases and all three sign off on involuntarily committing someone (or holding them for examination). That way you don’t just have one person making such a decision. You’d have a person answering the question “Is this individual a threat to himself or others;” you have a person answering the question “Is this being done within the law;” and you have a person answering the question “Does this individual display signs of mental illness or distress.” Unless all three of those questions come back “Yes,” no involuntary committment.
That’s just a hypothetical solution to how you could determine the who and how of involuntary committments. And I’m not saying this will catch everyone; but an incident like we had on Saturday shines a light on a problem. Even if people aren’t acting out with such drama and causing international headlines because of their mental illness, that doesn’t mean we don’t owe them the dignity of a mental health system that works. For their own safety, their family’s safety, for the safety of others, and for the sake of being humane.
$50 billion might not make it seem cost effective to prevent one child’s death, but how about for getting people off of the streets? Running a government isn’t a for-profit business. Our current mental healthcare system isn’t working, espeically for people that don’t have family, friends, money, insurance, or “involuntary evaluation” laws on their side. Are we supposed to not do anything about them just because they’re the “have-nots?”
How comfortable are we, as a society, with the idea that we are going to lock someone up indefinitely, and administer psychoactive drugs to them that are designed to alter their thinking, based on the idea that we are pretty sure he might commit a crime sometime in the future?
If you mean something else, I disagree that this is not a stretch - there is (in my view) a huge difference between being convicted and not being convicted, when dealing with the court system and especially with incarceration of any sort.
I remember some debates on this, in regards to pedophiliacs, and preventive incarceration or chemical (anit-viagra?) treatments. The main argument was that you can’t punish someone for something they might do.
My point is that people here and elsewhere view the penal system, at least in part, as a means of preventing crime.
Clearly, there’s a difference between people convicted of crimes and people who aren’t, but if some part of a convict’s sentence is to keep him from committing more crimes…
Again, think child molesters. They get put on a “list” for life. (And law enforcement is supposed to keep track of them.)
Some folks used to argue that once these guys serve their sentence they should be free of any more “punishment”. (And the lists were seen as an unfair Scarlet Letter type of situation.)
I don’t know enough about the disease; does a person with untreated schizophrenia have any periods of lucidity? Are there times when he would potentially be sufficiently receptive to persuasion that something along the lines of an addiction-related intervention might reach him, and convince him to consent to treatment?
They must have such periods, otherwise I’d assume they would not be left completely untreated or undiagnosed…even in the howling wilderness that is the US.
By the same token, if they have periods where they are lucid and, presumably act ‘normal’, this might account for how they could get their hot little hands on a gun.
The key word being “convict”. The idea of locking people up to prevent crime they may commit in the future rather plays hell with the American concept of “innocent until proven guilty”.
Unless you adopt some minimalist standard such as “posing an immediate danger to self or others”, in which case, here we are.
How about not doing it for crime prevention, per se, but rather for treating a sick person. We quarantine people all the time with diseases that might create a negative affect on society. This is similar.