"A nation, as a society, forms a moral person..."

"A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society." - Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792.

And so it continues! Five days after the Newtown shooting, the talk of gun control has only increased and today President BO declared that VP Joe Biden to tackle gun control. The good news is this means that it's likely that nothing will ever be accomplished, given who it is we're talking about. The bad news is, in addition to Obama having another scapegoat for yet another inevitable policy failure, some sort of action still needs to be taken.

I've already explained why gun control isn't the answer (in case you need a recap: it's our constitutional right to have a way to protect our selves and, oh yeah, it doesn't work). Something that might prove more effective would be reforming how we treat mentally ill patients. Now, I'm not saying that all mass shooters have been mentally ill (they haven't) or that this would solve all of our problems (it won't), but it's definitely something worth looking into.

Let's take a look at the position of the mentally ill in the United States today, ignoring mass shooters for a moment. It's estimated that about 22% of Americans suffer from some sort of mental illness. As of 2005, that's about 44 million people. Some of these 44 million people live under the care of their families. If you haven't read "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" yet, read it now. I'm not saying that's life for all families, but that's true for some of them. Some of these 44 million are homeless, making up between 20-25% of that population. Some of these 44 million are in hospitals, but more of them are in jail. As of 2005, there were 3 times more mentally ill in jails than in hospitals. 16% of inmates have a mental illness (compared to 6.4% in 1983) and 40% of mentally ill persons have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. And that's not surprising considering the state of psychiatric wards in hospitals: in 1955, 1 of every 300 beds was reserved for psychiatric patients; today, it's 1 in every 3,000.

So, just in terms completely unrelated to mass shooters, something needs to be done about the state of psychiatric treatment in America today. The way I see it, there are two main solutions: abolishing the "institutions for mental diseases" (IMD) Medicaid restriction and implementing Assisted outpatient treatment in every state.

The IMD Medicaid restriction, then. Basically under the current laws these institutes are inpatient facilities with more than 16 beds where more than half the patients have mental illnesses. Federal medicaid does not support patients between the ages of 22-64. The main reason for this is because when Medicaid started in 1965, mental hospitals were funded by the public and the government did not want to replace this funding. That's not how it works anymore, though. Now, adult patients either have to remain in the IMD and not have any federal support, or leave, have their Medicaid reinstated while they're treated in a different medical facility, and then return.

Assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), meanwhile, is a court ordered treatment for individuals with severe mental illness who meet certain criteria, like having a history of medical noncompliance. It's also sometimes referred to as the "involuntary outpatient commitment" because it allows for patients to receive treatment with or without their own consent if others believe they need it for their safety or others. Currently, 44 states enact AOT and it has been proven to reduce the risk of hospitalization, homelessness, arrests/incarceration, and violence while increasing the success of treatment and easing the stress of caregivers in those states. (For those interested in actual numbers, like me, here's a source.) Connecticut is not one of those states. A bill was proposed a few months ago that would have enacted it, but far leftist groups defeated the bill due to protests from "civil liberties" groups, saying it would "severely curtail the privacy rights and liberty issues of people with psychiatric disabilities." I'm not saying that the shooting wouldn't have happened in Newtown if this bill had passed. I'm not saying it wouldn't have either.

Implementing these changes has benefits for mentally ill patients around the country regardless of mass shooters, but that part does play a role. Like I said before, not all shooters are mentally ill (the two Columbine boys weren't) and definitely not all mentally ill grow up to become shooters. But Adam Lanza was. Ted Kaczynski "The Unabomber" was. Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech, the largest school shooting in American history, was. I don't know how these policies would have affected these incidents, but I see no down side for anyone by abolishing the IMD Medicaid restriction and implementing AOT in all 50 states.

Mental health care changes are just an idea, though, and I really don't know enough to say if they'd be successful. I don't know what would be successful because I don't really know what the problem is and I don't think anyone else does either, which is more than a little frightening. I can tell you what I think, though. I don't think all of these problems are gun issues and I don't think they're all about mental health care either. I think America as a society and a culture is the problem. For years, we've pushed God and morality to the side in order to be 'politically correct'. We have a president who, in four Thanksgiving Day speeches, has yet to thank God. We worship celebrities who are famous for getting drunk and cheer for athletes who cheat and rape while men like Tim Tebow are mocked nationwide for having good, strong moral and religious beliefs. We let children govern themselves, refusing to spank or punish them because we can't hurt their feelings. Then, in times of crisis, we wonder where God is and we wonder where human decency has gone. We kill it everyday. Maybe the Mayans were right. Maybe the world will end on December 21st; not the physical world, but our humanity.

Unless we change. I'm not talking about our politicians, I'm talking about change of the most intimate, personal kind: of the individual What we need is for every individual to take a look at themselves and ask, "What can I do? Who can I positively influence today? How can I be a good, moral person?" Because there will always be another Adam Lanza, another Ted Kaczynski, another Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and there's nothing we can do about that and that's reality, as painful as it can sometimes be, but we can be sure that we don't become that person and, by being the best we can be, maybe we can ensure that it's not our neighbor or our cousin or our classmate either.

God bless America.