When I lived in San Francisco, I worked in the security business for 12 years. I remember having to deal with a lot of mentally disturbed people, many of them homeless.Most of them were harmless to others, but clearly not able to take care of themselves properly or make good decisions without help. A few were obviously dangerous, to themselves and others.
Many on the left gleefully called it the Reagan legacy. And it's true, he did indeed play his part; yet Reagan was just one component. There was a coalition of liberal groups forming a "liberation movement" that had been pushing for release of mental patients from hospitals for many years. In the 1970's, this movement joined forces with fiscal conservatives to empty state run mental hospitals. This movement succeeded in other states as well.
Outpatient centers were supposed to replace the hospitals, at reduced cost. The left said this was more humane; the right said it would save money. When the outpatient centers failed miserably, funding for them was cut. The result is what we have today; chaos.
There is an excellent article by Dr. Jonathan Kellerman in the Opinion Journal that goes into this and much more:
Bedlam Revisited:
Why the Virginia Tech shooter was not committed.
An excerpt about the V-Tech shooting:
[...] Diagnosis from afar is the purview of talk-shows hosts and other charlatans, and I will not attempt to detail the psyche of the Virginia Tech slaughterer. But I will hazard that much of what has been reported about his pre-massacre behavior--prolonged periods of asocial mutism and withdrawal, irrational anger and hatred, bizarre writing and speech--is not at odds with the picture of a fulminating, serious mental disease. And his age falls squarely within the most common period when psychosis blossoms.
No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous "counseling"--an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to "treatment" for a patient with metastasized cancer.
But even that minimal care wasn't given. The shooter didn't want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it's been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a "Behavioral Health Center" in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.
That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.
If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would've been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might've even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it's possible confinement would've been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances.
At the very least, in a better world, time spent on psychiatric watch could've been used to justify placing the Virginia killer on a no-buy gun list. I'm not naïve enough to believe that illegal firearms aren't within reach for anyone who really wants them, but just as loud dogs deter burglars and crime rates drop during harsh weather, sometimes making life difficult for a would-be criminal is enough. [...]
(bold emphasis mine) He goes on to explain why it has become impossible to intervene in cases such as this, and how we can expect more of the same, unless we become willing to deal with the facts that face us. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how we have ended up with things the way they are, and what we might now consider doing about it.
