Madness, Murder & Due Process

Unless you have been visiting Mars the last few weeks, you know what this article is about just from the title. We have a problem, and if we do not start to solve this problem, all the progress gun owners have made over the last few years is in danger of being flushed down the toilet. Even worse, a startling number of gun owners seem to have bought into the ideologically pure views of the ACLU concerning mental illness and due process. The problem is pretty obvious: in the 1960s and 1970s, a variety of forces came together to destroy the traditional mental hospital system in the United States. Many state mental hospitals were crowded and underfunded. Until the development of chlorpromazine in the 1950s, these hospitals were just warehouses for psychotics--those people who had lost touch with reality. In addition, state mental hospitals were crowded with large numbers of people dying of Alzheimer's or syphilitic insanity. (1) (Both groups are gone now: the advent of Medicare moved the elderly into private nursing care, (2) and antibiotics have made syphilitic insanity extraordinarily rare.)