Navy Yard shooter: Why was he free?

Guns did not kill 12 people at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard last week, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. That tragedy was the work of Aaron Alexis, who recently told Newport, R.I., police he was hearing voices and being attacked by microwave radiation—“the classic symptoms of schizophrenia.” But Alexis’s obvious mental illness was ignored; he went to buy a shotgun in Virginia, where he passed state and federal background checks, and committed mass murder. A “civilized society” would have committed Alexis for psychiatric help, given him antipsychotic medication, and released him only when he was no longer a danger to himself and other people. Instead Alexis “fell back through the cracks,” and now he and 12 others are dead. This is a “national scandal,” demonstrating that we need to reform our involuntary treatment laws and improve reporting of mental illness.

“The fix isn’t that simple,” said Joseph Tanfani in the Los Angeles Times. Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerously ill people requires a functioning national background-check system, and the one we have is badly flawed. States aren’t required to provide mental-health records to the federal government—and even if they do, the standard for inclusion requires a “court ruling of insanity,” which even most involuntarily hospitalized patients do not receive. Besides, the vast majority of mentally ill people are “no danger to anyone at all,” said Garance Franke-Ruta in TheAtlantic.com. Over half of all Americans will experience some form of mental illness during their lives, ranging from anxiety disorders to depression to bipolar disease to schizophrenia; how do we decide when someone might be dangerous? Pretending that we can identify and lock up every potential homicidal maniac is the gun lobby’s convenient dodge to the real issue here—the ease with which anyone “bent on mayhem and murder” can buy deadly weapons.

So after yet another mass shooting, we’re at “a stalemate,” said Emily Bazelon in Slate.com. Civil libertarians believe it would be “a frightening loss of freedom” to give the government the authority to track or lock up anyone who seems mentally ill. They don’t want to further stigmatize mental illness and deter people from getting the help they need. But gun-rights absolutists believe “it’s a frightening loss of freedom” to make it harder to buy guns. “So we have lots of freedom and also lots of death. Time after time.”

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