The shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue—11 dead, 6 wounded—was especially shocking: It was the most lethal attack on Jews in American history. At the same it reminded us how disconcertingly commonplace mass violence has become. In February, 17 people were gunned down at a high school in Florida, and in May, 10 people were shot to death at a high school in Texas. A year ago, 58 people at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas were killed, and a few weeks later, 26 congregants at a church in Texas were shot to death.
In the past, such events have been followed by a national argument about guns and gun control. In recent years there have been some state and federal measures designed to ban certain weapons from private ownership and to raise obstacles to the purchase of guns. But the evidence suggests that, whatever their intent, these measures have not succeeded in reducing gun crime, much less the sort of atrocity that occurred in Pittsburgh. Indeed, gun violence seems especially lethal in places (Chicago most notably) where gun laws are most restrictive.
Since the Pittsburgh horror, however, the gun-control argument has been comparatively muted. Part of this may be recognition among advocates that the cause isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The other reason is strictly political: It has become common practice, on the political left at any rate, to shift the blame for such incidents to President Trump. The fact that the victims in Pittsburgh were deliberately targeted because they were Jews—in a manner reminiscent of the shooting deaths of nine black churchgoers in Charleston (2015)—makes such arguments irresistible: Trump is regarded by his adversaries as, ipso facto, a racial and religious bigot and public advocate of violence.
The fact that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are Jewish or that the most violent rhetoric in American politics tends to emanate from the left makes no difference. The same claims, under similar circumstances, were made about Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and most modern Republican presidents.
It is, at any rate, a debate that no one can win. Blaming Trump for the shooting death of worshipers at a synagogue won’t dissuade admirers, and defending Trump against a politicized libel won’t have much effect on critics. In the aftermath of Pittsburgh, the only common ground seems to have been the obvious sentiment that the anti-Semitism that inspired the gunman is abhorrent to Americans and that “this evil must end,” in the words of Vice President Mike Pence.
The truth, however, is that nearly everybody understands that “this evil”—and by that I mean mass shootings—is not likely to end, either by way of federal legislation or by replacing the current occupant of the White House. There is, however, one approach to this national dilemma that, in due course, might begin to reverse the gathering trend. May I offer a modest suggestion?
Religious/political terrorism has been the likely cause of a handful of recent episodes, most notably the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas (2009), and the shooting deaths of 14 others at a social-services center in San Bernardino (2015). But a common thread running through most lethal incidents is mental illness. And by that I do not mean the freedom of psychotics to purchase guns but the fact that so many of them—deranged, incapacitated, violent, delusional, menacing—are free to roam, and in many cases reside on, America’s streets.
Ponder the mug shots, or postmortem case histories, of the great majority of mass shooters in recent decades, and you don’t need professional medical training to recognize them as insane. This is not to say that all psychotics are violent or potentially dangerous; obviously, most are not. And it is certainly true that the modern revolution in psychotropic drugs has allowed untold numbers of sufferers who would otherwise have led tortured lives to approach a semblance of normality.
Unfortunately, the benefits of therapy and routine medication are not available to all. And to the extent that mental equilibrium is dependent on the capacity of patients to seek regular treatment—or enjoy the luxury of concerned families or support networks—a disturbing number of people fall through the cracks. Any resident of any American city encounters them regularly on the sidewalk or in subway stations or parks, sleeping in daytime, occasionally malnourished, usually threadbare, freezing in wintertime, unwashed and malodorous, occasionally violent.
No doubt there are homeless people down on their luck or victims of economic dislocation. But like their brooding, obsessive brethren in the basements of our parallel universe, they are largely mentally ill—and as is often the case, unintended victims of a well-intentioned reform.
Deinstitutionalization, the awkward term for the gradual dismemberment of the nation’s patchwork system of state and municipal psychiatric hospitals, began as a humane reaction to the parlous state of public mental hospitals, which, like prisons and urban school systems, had grown overcrowded, underfunded, and chronically dangerous.
What began as a series of corrective measures, however, was swiftly superseded by a doctrinaire form of civil libertarianism. Vagrancy laws disappeared from the statute books, or were no longer enforced, and the process by which sick, endangered, or violent people could be involuntarily committed for observation and treatment—whether by families, courts, or emergency rooms—became almost impenetrable.
The movement was greatly accelerated by passage of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, a signature achievement of the Kennedy administration that promised considerably more than it ever delivered. And with disastrous consequences: The intent of the bill was to replace the big, bad state hospitals with thousands of smaller, community-based “mental health centers” to which patients could commute for periodic medication and therapy.
The problem, of course, is that the signature achievements of Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson—the War on Poverty and the Vietnam war—drained the supply of available funds for community centers along with any mechanism ensuring that patients get routine treatment. Successive closures of state hospitals, along with the failure to construct most of the proposed community-based centers, effectively stranded America’s mentally ill. The fact that the ultimate failure of the Community Mental Health Act coincided, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, with the explosion in America’s homeless population was no coincidence, but cause and effect.
To what extent violence, and especially mass shootings, can be contained or cured is an open question: Social pathologies and cultural trends can be inexorable, and legislation is susceptible to unintended consequences (see above). Nor can we ever really predict whether the problem is destined to intensify, as seems to be happening, or may fluctuate as cultural trends tend to do. Blaming the actions of insane individuals on successive politicians is largely politics and unlikely to yield results.
Still, it seems self-evident that the highway to Pittsburgh does have an exit ramp: We need to reconsider the inchoate system by which we determine what people are genuine dangers to themselves and to their fellow citizens, how to discern such dangers, and what to do about it. The old state hospitals were not nice places, and new ones aren’t guaranteed to be better. But living in a medicated, insulated state is preferable to self-inflicted torture on the street—and safer for the rest of us.
In a society preoccupied with rights and privileges it will not be easy to balance constitutional requirements with demands for public safety, respond to warning signs as well as overt acts, or act coercively at all. New approaches, new laws, and new institutions won’t emerge overnight. No system is perfect and no cure is absolute.
But nothing thus far—blaming Trump, conducting vigils, debating the differences between one gun and another—has had much discernible effect on a problem that stares at us vacantly, and hauntingly, from the mug shots of killers.
