Forget Gun Control: Bring Back Mental HospitalsAmerican Greatness, Mar 1, 2018, Joseph Scalia
After another inexplicable act of violence in Parkland Florida claimed 17 lives, the usual chorus (and some of the not so usual chorus) is screaming for gun control. We don’t need gun control; we need nut control.
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Many purportedly smart people run around decrying inanimate objects for causing death and mayhem. Our streets, schools, workplaces have become killing grounds because any lunatic can get his hands on a gun (or guns) and carry out a massacre. But a closer inspection of the headlines reveals a myriad of machete attacks, people pushed into oncoming subway cars, a man holed up in a bunker, and ex-cop on a bloody rampage—and who can forget the bath salts man who cannibalized a man on the streets of Miami? And so it goes with each bizarre and horrible story replaced by the next stupefying act of insanity.
Why is this happening? Guns? We’ve had guns for centuries. The real and ignored reason is a policy called “deinstitutionalization,†which is a fancy way of saying “let’s close the mental hospitals to save money.â€
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Closing the mental hospitals was a particularly cruel idea. The notion that people with raging mental illnesses could be medicated and set loose upon the streets and in our communities is insane in its own right. This is an arrangement from which no one benefits. How does such a thing happen? It is simple. The fiscal “conservatives†of that day saw a way to cut the expenses of operating large mental institutions. They made common cause with the Left of that time because they believed in that nonsensical notion of people having a “right†to wander the streets and sleep in their own feces. It’s a political partnership made in hell.
Read more:
https://amgreatness.com/2018/03/01/forget-gun-control-bring-back-mental-hospitals/
