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I completed a sentence for you (and bolded it) to make it more accurate.
It’s interesting to see the freedom-loving right suddenly in favor of having people “committed” indefinitely for mental health issues that can now be treated with medication. That’s unconstitutional.
Let’s take a look at your example of the typical troublesome mental health patient, would-be shooter:
“The police have had several encounters with him but he keeps getting put back out the streets after each arrest. He has no friends or family so there is no one making sure he takes his meds.” That’s what happens when you commit a misdemeanor - you get out after a short stay in jail. Hell, that’s the whole basis of the criminal justice system - we don’t incarcerate people for what they could do. Besides, jails and prisons have very little means to care for people with serious mental health issues, so they just get worse behind bars and cause problems for staff and other inmates. What do you expect them to do? Either way, have you ever looked at the statistics for the % of inmates with mental health issues? Commitment never really went away - it’s just called incarceration now. Also, are you suggesting that people who lack a support network should be held in custody longer as a result? It’s amazing the amount of rights you seem willing to violate in order to protect your favorite one.
It seems like you want to arrest and commit everyone with mental health issues who lack the means to get treatment or a support network rather than admit that all the other countries have mentally unwell people too. We all have them. What we don’t have is a system that makes it so easy for them to get their hands on a gun. Look at Stephen Paddock. His money and family and lack of obvious mental health issues didn’t prevent him from being the most deadly mass shooter in US history. His ability to buy dozens of semi-auto rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition for them are why that massacre happened. You can say it as many times as you want, but reality doesn’t seem to agree that a gun is just like any other tool. I don’t see a lot of mass hammerings in the news and mass stabbings are rare and much less lethal when they do occur.
It’s also amusing to see the right so invested in costly care for mental health. Who’s going to pay for that care? Who’s going to judge which people are dangerous and which are not? How are you going to circumvent the Constitution to deprive people of their liberty based on what they might do? I know you guys loathe taxes, so who’s going to pay the bill for all this?
It should also be noted that the main reason why people aren’t “committed” for longer than a few weeks is because there now exists medication that allows people with serious psychiatric disorders to live normal lives. The thing is, once you get that script, the duty of care ends. No one can force someone to take medication, except in extreme circumstances where a judge has ordered it. Mass shooters historically commit the act long before they have any real entanglements with the legal system on account of their mental illness. There are also a sizable number who aren’t mentally ill. They’re just anti-social or angry, with lots of deadly weapons at their disposal. Dylan Roof and the guy in Buffalo last week are just two examples.
It’s amazing how much some of you are willing to trample on the Constitutional rights of the mentally ill as long as you don’t have to inconvenience gun owners. The one question no one here seems to be asking is how all these shooters managed to get guns so easily and if that really is the price you’re willing to pay for freedom.
Regardless, I doubt more than a couple people on this board have been touched directly by indiscriminate gun violence committed by a mass shooter. Makes it a lot easier to be a Second Amendment absolutist while still wanting to “commit” people with mental illness.
The Second Amendment is to protect against overreaching government tyranny and it will be needed in the next 20 years I predict... partly because of the progressives who are naive and brainwashed into thinking we can be some peaceful Utopia and that there's nothing to fear by having a benevolent government micromanage Our Lives from cradle to grave.
It’s just a evidence that gun owners don’t like so it doesn’t count.
A painful and embarrassing inconvenient truth. Never happen in the US - which is run by a ship of self-serving fools.
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