I spent a good portion of the weekend in front of the TV, watching CNN. On Saturday, a crazy man in Tucson, AZ killed 6 people and wounded 14, including a Congressional Representative. I just don’t understand why these things continue to happen. The guy is obviously mentally ill. Back in the day (early 70’s) I worked for the University of Toledo School of Law Mental Health Clinic. Our office was located at the Toledo Mental Health Center, a mental hospital where they routinely locked up crazy people. I worked with legal interns and a law professor (Robin Kennedy) to help get people out who were able to function outside on their own. There were few who qualified to be released back then.

Today mental hospitals are a thing of the past. Families routinely had relatives ‘committed’ to mental hospitals when they exhibited signs of paranoia, schiztophrenia, etc. Today there is no where for mentally ill people to be confined. So they wind up buying guns and killing innocent people. The mental hospitals (also known as State Hospitals in many places) were shut down because of continual problems with the care provided these people–and procedures that were no doubt harmful to the patients.

While I understand a lot of the reasoning for closing down the mental hospitals, it seems there ought to be some type of an alternative–other than jails. Maybe then we wouldn’t have crazy people wandering the streets with guns and killing people.