Here we seem to have another story of a man who is deranged, but because he refused help, was not placed in the protective confines of a mental hosptial. Now he has killed six people.
When is someone going to run for office calling for a return to compulsory hospitalization for mentally ill people who are lively danger to themselves and others? The process of decision making for such hospitalization should be carefully hedged by reviews. But the "reforms" of the 70s that led to de-institutionalization went too far and made it impossible to instigate involuntary institutionalization and/or treatment until a person demonstrated how dangerous he was by actually killing or injuring someone. This kind of "reform" was the equivalent of a political crime, allowing liberals to preen as libertarians and conservatives as cost-cutters. But there actually are huge losses of liberty and huge costs. Think of the six dead people and their families. What about their liberties and their livelihoods?
More than anything else, the film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" led to a bogus, over-wrought, counter-productive reform in state after state.
Again, where are the candidates who will raise the issue of real reform? How does it benefit society--or even people like Isaac Zamora, not to mention his truly pitiful mother--to let dangerous madmen loose?
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