Rick Moran, writing at PJ Media, thinks it is time to do something about mental illness and observes correctly that we’ve gotten away from institutionalizing people who need it. That Lewiston shooter Robert Card’s red flags should have ended with him disarmed and in a facility.
Despite red lights flashing continuously, Robert Card was allowed to walk freely. No one thought to take his firearm from him — a move Second Amendment purists would have opposed. No one suggested that he be readmitted to the inpatient mental health facility he stayed in for two weeks last summer.
I’ve seen my share of notions about Lewiston. How the “authorities” knew the shooter, had been in contact, or how he had a history of mental illness and no one thought to keep an eye on him. Maybe they were too busy spying on parents who opposed explicit sexual material in grade schools or engaging in witch hunts against doctors who treated COVID patients the wrong way. So many distractions. Whatever the issue, the system that insists it will protect us where we are unarmed failed to do that in Lewiston, which is a point left out of many discussions.
The shooter knew where to find people whom the state of Maine had disarmed.
Call me a Second Amendment purist, but the most common factor in every mass shooting is the absence of equal or greater force and the ability of the allegedly mentally insane to know this.
Robert Card could have picked a gun range, a gun show, an NRA event, or any number of public or private locations where Mainers – who can still conceal carry without a permit – might be armed in numbers, someplace where it would be a challenge to shoot let alone kill more than one or two people before there was return fire.
Getting shot at changes your priorities and, in that situation, likely ends with the shooter dead. No statewide manhunt is needed. No suspicious suicide days later. He’s bleeding out on the floor of the first building he entered.
I’m not saying Card wasn’t another poster child for why you should separate the mentally ill from weapons, but that’s not what the gun grabbers are trying to do. They want to strip due process protections and property rights on a whim. Their goal is to disarm people who follow the law. It is also (IMO) why they have opposed institutionalizing those who have severe mental illness against their will.
Crazy people shooting up the world helps the Left advance their agenda, the same as letting criminals wander free. Chaos leads to disorder, which lends itself to totalitarian interventions. If you do it right, a once proudly free people will beg for it.
The more straightforward solution is to end gun-free zones.
Mr. Moran never mentions this or the absence of return fire. It may be on his mind, but it is not the object of his attention in this piece.
No one likes the obvious solution — locking the mentally ill away to protect society from their predation. But the courts have decided in their infinite wisdom that mentally ill people should roam our streets freely unless they demonstrate the danger they pose to the rest of us.
Locking them away will prove to be a problem because we’ve been tearing down mental health facilities — including hospitals and long-term care facilities — at a record pace. Maine may be a typical state as far as mental health services go.
He’s not wrong. The shift in focus from confinement and treatment is a problem. Robert Card needed help. He was sending all the signals. But no one could be bothered to pay attention – even chat over coffee – until he found a place and a way to get our attention. And regardless of your take on the problem, if even a few of his victims had been armed, he’d have gotten a lot of attention the minute he showed up armed and shooting.
Robert Card would have likely died there and then, and plenty of other people might still be alive, their natural rights and liberties intact. Not a conclusion I’d expect from Democrat Gov. Janet Mills’s newly announced “independent commission” to probe the Lewiston shooting, but it should. And we could still have the conversation about mental health without robbing law-abiding citizens of their right to shoot back when attacked.
