Once again another mass shooting has us debating mental illness and guns. Pessimist though I am, I had hoped that the Sandy Hook tragedy would finally be the tipping point that would force something in this country to change. Why I had that momentary lapse of reason I’m not exactly sure.
Because, you see, this is the land of the free. And when we say that, we mean it. This is honestly not going to be a political rant. I’m not going to debate the value of our freedoms. They simply are what they are, and that’s what we have to accept. Also, we very often no longer make legislation that makes sense in this country. We make legislation that adheres to a particular “idea” of what America is, and not necessarily what’s good for us.
We have the right to bear arms. It’s in the constitution, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, especially not with the money the gun lobby puts into the pockets of politicians.
Those of us who have mentally ill relatives, or who struggle with mental illness ourselves, know all too well that the mentally ill are really freakin’ free in this country. Free to wander the streets with no guarantee of shelter, no medical treatment and certainly no place for psychiatric treatment. In fact, the only tax-payer provided option for the mentally ill in this country is jail. That’s it.
When you have a mentally ill relative, people say things to you like, “Why don’t you have them committed?” as though that’s something we still do here. We haven’t done it for years. The only way a mentally ill person gets help in this country is:
1) They have to want help—and since mentally ill people often don’t recognize they’re mentally ill they often refuse treatment,
2) They (or their family) can afford it, and what mentally ill person is holding down and job and can afford treatment?
3) They hurt themselves or someone else or do something illegal (and the vast majority of mentally ill people aren’t violent) and then they’ll go not for treatment, but to jail.
Otherwise, unless and until a mentally ill person is a danger to someone else, there’s nothing anyone can do for them. If you think about it, asking the family to take on the responsibility for a mentally ill person is really an impossibility. We’re not all trained psychiatrists after all, most of us don’t have vast resources to spend helping a mentally ill relative and even if we do, we can’t force them into treatment. Even well-off families have a hard time intervening in their relatives’ lives. (Think Adam Lanza and now Elliot Rodgers.)
We can’t provide taxpayer mandated help to people in this country anymore because we decided it’s too close to “socialism,” and we hate socialism in the U.S. But we love guns. And we love freedom. We love guns and freedom so much that we are reluctant to prevent even crazy people from getting their hands on guns. Because that might be interfering with their freedom, and that makes us feel bad inside. In fact, we hate interfering with peoples’ freedoms so much that in the 1960s, we opened the doors on the mental institutions, let the mentally ill out and then closed the doors again, forever. (A lot of people will try to tell you that it was Reagan who closed down the institutions and asylums, but it was actually Kennedy.) There was a legitimate fear of a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest situation, so we decided that letting the mentally ill be free was preferable to locking them up and potentially being mistreated.
So that’s where we are. We are really the only developed country in the world where guns can be procured without any interference and the mentally ill are left to their own devices.
All in the name of freedom.
