By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
There's been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and
liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerous mentally
ill.
The man who shot up the Washington Navy Yard on Monday,
Aaron Alexis, heard voices speaking to him through the walls. He thought people
were following him. He believed microwave ovens were sending vibrations through
his body. There are also reports that Alexis believed the Obamacare exchanges
were ready to go.
Anyone see any bright red flags of paranoid schizophrenia?
(Either that, or Obama's NSA is way better than we thought!)
But Alexis couldn't be institutionalized because the left
has officially certified the mentally ill as "victims," and once
you're a victim, all that matters is that you not be "stigmatized."
But here's the problem: Coddling the mentally ill isn't
even helping the mentally ill. Ask the sisters of crazy homeless woman
"Billie Boggs" how grateful they were to the ACLU for keeping Boggs
living on the streets of New York City. Ask the parents of Aaron Alexis, James
Holmes (Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooter), Jared Loughner (Tucson, Ariz.,
mall shooter) or Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter) how happy they are that
their sons weren't institutionalized.
Tellingly, throughout the last three decades, the overall
homicide rate has been in free fall, thanks to Republican crime policies, from
10 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4 per 100,00 today. (You might even call them
"common sense" crime policies.) But the number of mass shootings has
skyrocketed from 4 per year, between 1900 and 1970, to 29 per year since then.
Something seems to have gone horribly wrong right around
1970. What could it be? Was it the introduction of bell-bottoms?
That date happens to correlate precisely with when the
country began throwing the mentally ill out of institutions in 1969. Your
memory of there not being as many mass murders a few decades ago is correct.
Your memory of there not being as many homeless people a few decades ago is
also correct.
But liberals won't allow the dangerous mentally ill to be
committed to institutions against their will. (The threat of commitment is very
persuasive in getting disturbed individuals to take their medicine.) Something
in liberals' genetic makeup compels them to attack civilization, for example,
by defending the right of dangerous psychotics to refuse treatment and then
representing them in court after they commit murder.
Liberals won't even agree to take the most basic steps to
prevent psychotics from purchasing guns -- yes, GUNS! -- because to allow the
release of mental health information would be "stigmatizing." We're
not talking about anorexic girls here. We just need shrinks to tell us if
potential gun purchasers are paranoid schizophrenics.
The disastrous consequences of the deinstitutionalization
movement is described in E. Fuller Torrey's book, The Insanity Offense: How
America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens.
Torrey's book reads like a compendium of America's most heinous murders since
the early '70s -- all of which could have been stopped with involuntary
commitment laws, and none of which could have been stopped even with a complete
gun ban.
Here are a few:
-- "Mary Maloney had decapitated her infant daughter
and year-old son. Her husband had tried to have her psychiatrically
hospitalized prior to the crime, but she had not met the (legal) criteria for
dangerousness."
-- "Charles Soper had killed his wife, three children,
and himself two weeks after being discharged from Camarillo State Hospital
because he failed to qualify as 'imminently dangerous.'"
-- "In April 1973 ... Edmund Kemper (who had been
released from a mental hospital a few years earlier when the deinstitutionalization
act became law) had been arrested after he bludgeoned his mother to death, then
strangled her friend who came to visit. Kemper was also charged with the
murders of six female hitchhikers."
Kemper had originally been institutionalized after murdering
his grandparents at age 15 because "he tired of their company."
In 1972 and 1973, paranoid schizophrenic Herb Mullin went
on a killing spree in California that left 13 dead, including a 72-year-old
World War I veteran, a college coed, four teenaged campers and a mother with
her two little boys, murdered as they played with marbles.
Mullin killed his victims with a baseball bat, knives,
his fists, as well as with guns. How's your "high-capacity" magazine
ban going to stop that, Democrats? How would piling on yet more gun control
laws have helped the priest whom Herb Mullin beat, kicked and stabbed to death?
What about the elderly boarders that Dorothea Puente --
diagnosed with schizophrenia -- poisoned and buried in her backyard?
What additional gun restrictions would have helped the
group of bicyclists Linda Scates intentionally drove her car into because
voices were telling her to "kill the demons"?
In the decades since the deinstitutionalization movement
began, more and more people kept being killed as a result of that movement --
including the deinstitutionalized themselves. According to Torrey, between 1970
and 2004, the mentally ill were responsible for at least 4,700 murders in
California.
Increasing government spending on mental health programs
is not going to stop the mentally ill from committing murder. Like liberals,
these are people too sick even to know they need help. As Herschel Hardin,
whose son was schizophrenic, wrote in the Vancouver Sun: "If you think you
are Jesus Christ or an avenging angel, you are not likely to agree that you
need to go to the hospital."
Liberals will pretend to have missed the news that the
Washington Navy Yard shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic. They refuse to
acknowledge that the mass murder problem -- as well as the homeless problem --
only began after crazy people were thrown out of institutions in the 1970s.
They tell us crapping in your pants on a New York City sidewalk is a
"civil right." They say that haranguing passersby on the street about
your persecution by various movie stars is a form of "free speech."
Only after a mass murder committed by a psychotic with a
firearm do liberals spring to life and suggest a solution: Take away everyone's
guns.
Taking guns away from the mentally stable only makes us
less safe: Even psychotics know enough to keep choosing "Gun-Free
Zones" for their mass murders. If Americans are serious about preventing
massacres like the ones at the Washington Navy Yard, Newtown, Tucson, Aurora
and Virginia Tech, it's time to review our civil commitment laws.
After this latest shooting, will the left finally let us
do something about the dangerously mentally ill?
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