Newtown massacre and the end of Mental Hospitals

About Newtown and many similar incidents, no-one mentions one very obvious major factor here: Starting in the 1960's in USA and 1980's in Brazil liberals started campaigning to stop holding mentally ill people in public mental hospitals. They claimed that the family should take care of these persons themselves, ignoring that this is wishful thinking to imagine that the family will be able to do something in cases of violent mentally ill persons where even doctors have problems. This just puts the family at risk of being killed.

As a result, lots and lots of public mental hospitals were closed in the USA and in Brazil. In Brazil richer families have to pay huge amounts of money to get mentally ill relatives in a private facility. As for the poor, they just throw the person in the street, where he will either end up a crazy homeless, or will end up dead, or kill someone.

The result can be seen in graphic for USA:

As a small warning about the graphic, one should not interpretate the total increase in prison rates as merely being a result of the end of mental hospitals. I would say that the end of mental hospitals might have increased a little bit the crime rate (mentally ill persons cause 5% of violent crimes), but most of the increase is just a increase in violence, decrease in values, decrease in religious belief, nihilism, moral relativism, moral liberalism, the gangster culture, drugs, etc, etc. But still, less danger and less murders would always be welcome.

Now continuing on the topic, this comment in a blog also explains a lot of things, taken from here http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2012/12/isolation-and-insanity/

"Why had no one stepped in and institutionalized this young man? Where were the doctors to confine him to a mental institution? Since these are essentially the same question, they can be answered together. In most states, people can be involuntarily committed only if they meet one of the following criteria: 1) they are a danger to themselves; 2) they are a danger to others; or 3) they are gravely disabled. Medication usually alleviates these symptoms. Once the symptoms are alleviated, the institution must release the patient, who stops his medications because they make him feel bad. The cycle starts over. I have been involved in many commitments."

Also interresting for further reading on the topic:

*http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2012/12/antidepressants-and-mania/

*http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/the_shortage_of_publichospital_beds.pdf

"4. The emergence of a group of young, civil libertarian lawyers in the 1960s who decided that mental patients needed to be “liberated.” They implemented a series of successful lawsuits, forcing states to discharge mental patients and making rehospitalization exceedingly difficult."

So why this isn't mentioned in the big media, and everyone talks only about guns? Well, the answer is obvious. The big media is dominated my the liberal ideology, and they could not possibly criticise a liberal idea, the end of mental hospitals.

But of course don't confuse anything said here as resulting in me being in favor of the open sale of assault weapons. While I find the need for small arms for self defense legitimate, I'm pretty sure that a person can defend itself with a pistol. In which situation a assault weapon would be useful for defense? Only in very unlikely events, like a military invasion or civil war. Assault weapons are large automatic rifles designed to kill as many people in as short a timeframe as possible, not something which a sane people would carry anywhere. So I favor banning assault weapons from sale, but still the complete answer to the problem must involve bringing back mental hospitals, or else he could just as well have done this with a knife, as has already happened in Japan and China...

As for this last position about banning assault weapons, this link might be interresting: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/024069.html

Let's pray that God help our violent world become more peaceful.