What if.
I've gone on and on about the state of mental health treatment
policy in this country and that a lot of the mass murders (and countless
one-off single murders that don't make the news...) can be laid
(layed? PAH!) at the feet of the de-institutionalization.
But what if. What if Kennedy era reforms that eventually emptied the
insance asylums had been different? What if the hospitals were
reformed and made less abusive but still in place today and full?
That's a big if. Expecting gov't run concerns to be effective,
competently run, and compassionate when they service a subset of the
population with almost no political influence and pull... But let's
just say...
Would that mean there wouldn't have been any mass shootings? No. I
can say with a certainty that fully funded insane asylums acting as
custodians to dangerous schizophrenics would not have caught all the
spree shooters.
Maybe the Gabby Giffords shooter would have been swept up. And the
Aurora shooter. The Newtown shooter was getting 'home treatment' and
the family might not have given him up, hoping everything would be ok.
The Virginia Tech shooter might have been institutionalized, but he was
young and it's not like he couldn't function in university society.
Still, if memory serves, he was on the radar.
The Navy Yard shooter had only relatively recently gotten onto the
mental healthy radar. So unless they clapped him in the booby hatch as
soon as he told cops he heard voices... There'd have been nothing
stopping his atrocity. No, there is other things coming out as facts
come to the fore. He had other contacts, he might have been noticed in
time from more than just Rhode Island constabulary.
Charles Whitman at the Texas Tower obviously DID escape custodial
care at a mental hospital. I don't think the Columbine shooters would
have been caught up yet. THe Ft Hood shooter was a terrist.
So, the answer would be "some of the mass murders might not have
happened if we still had working asylums, but not all." Plus all the
people that ARE committed that WOULDN'T have committed any horrific act
worse than urinating in public and panhandling would have their civil
rights violated by indefinite involuntary incarceration when they could
have funtioned after a fashion on their own relatively well. All for
the convenience of the Greater Public.
So a return to that old regime is not a panacea. It might be something, but not everything.
Hitler or Stalin?
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The Harris side tells us that Trump is a fascist. The Trump side tells us
that Harris is a communist. Hence, this year a case can be made that most
voters ...
7 hours ago
2 comments:
I place the blames squarely on the ACLU for this crap...
A good first step is to quit pouring pills down kid's throats. Pretty much every mass shooting has that one factor involved. They didn't drug kids when I went to school. If they got too far out of line, a good swat on the ass put a end to it for a while. None of them showed up and started shooting either. Hell, in 1966, I took a 410 shotgun and a box of shells to school, on the bus, for show and tell. I was 11. No one died or was even wounded.
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