Following the recent Navy yard shooting . . . much talk of gun control.
But the more “clever” and “sophisticated” response is to advocate cracking down on crazy people. You know, “put away” people who are a danger to themselves and others. So argues Charles Krauthammer, the psychiatrist-turned-columnist.
Not so fast, writes Brian Doherty at Reason: “No, Arbitrarily Locking Up People Instead of Restricting Guns Isn’t a Good Option Either.”
There are all sorts of things we could do . . . to violate the rights of citizens because they are in a class that sometimes but really hardly ever goes on to commit a crime. Of course, it’s best, as Krauthammer does, to say it’s not just for our (possibly presumed) good that we do it: it’s for theirs.
Wanting a quick cure for the problem of mass shootings is not the same thing as having one.* Doherty notes that, “like most gun control solutions offered,” the idea of locking up the mentally ill is “just one more thing to say that pretends on the surface to be a solution” but that “would not necessarily have prevented the particular problem.”
Science has come a long way, but studies show, as fellow Reason writer Jacob Sullum recently put it, that even “mental health professionals are notoriously bad at predicting which of the world’s many misfits, cranks, and oddballs will become violent.”
An easy fix? Science fictional, not scientific. And we know what science fiction says about locking people up for institutional convenience.
That’s truly crazy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Wanting a quick cure for the broader problems of the mentally disturbed is also not the same thing as having one.
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
