There is much discussion in the United States about gun control.
The Left is fanatic about the need to control guns as a way to keep criminals and dangerous lunatics from killing everybody.
The Right points out that the problem is that laws don’t affect criminals and that mental illness is usually the cause of mass killings not guns.
The problem with government control of the mental illness problem is that we can neither trust the government to make such judgments nor can we trust the term ‘mental illness’ to be a reliable term.
An experiment at Stanford got 19 psychology students committed to mental institutions after they studied a variety of mental illnesses that they simulated. They were unable to get themselves out of the mental illness institutions. Even the faculty and the Dean of Stanford had trouble getting them out because there is no definition of ‘not mentally ill’.
I have also pointed out in earlier blogs that dangerous people are easily identified at the kindergarten and first grade stage but we would never want somebody labeled all their life based on observations at that age.
I have a solution.
At this point we have drugs that can control some of the worst forms of mental illness. In a few instances, where I have personally observed it, these drugs are terribly effective. The person is stable and reliable on the drugs and crazed when off the drug.
My solution is to create a special court that has the power to supervise people on mental illness controlling drugs who are potentially dangerous when they are off the drugs. People will be able to appeal to this court to get off the drugs when they can demonstrate stability and lack of danger. But the court will have the power to enforce the continued use of the drug when the drug use shows clear ability to restrain dangerous behavior.
The court is not a psychologist. The court looks only at behavioral evidence. The court does not prescribe mental illness drugs nor apply them in the first case. It only deals with people who are on drugs and stable while on the drugs.
What is your response to this idea?