Some thoughts on our unwillingness to force treatment or confinement on the dangerously mentally ill. Of course, it's a fine balance of civil liberties:

No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous "counseling"--an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to "treatment" for a patient with metastasized cancer.

But even that minimal care wasn't given. The shooter didn't want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it's been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a "Behavioral Health Center" in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.

That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.

If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would've been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might've even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it's possible confinement would've been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances.

The funniest thing is that I bet she didn’t even realize how much mockery she would receive for this. Besides, what does she care, she probably has someone to do her dirty work anyway.

Yes, TnT, this is what I meant:

Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.

When I read the Opinion Journal essay, I was struck by a few things differently than the writer. Yes, it turned out to be a tragic mistake to empty the asylums. While most of the inmates were no danger to anyone but themselves, the emptying did help create the homeless problem which has plagued American cities for decades now.

There is a point, though, that the author missed. Some societies do better at dealing with the mentally ill than others. The Belgian village is a case in point. There's also the idea that some places actively drive people around the bend. Stress levels a generation ago were quite high in New York City. I and other people in my social psychology program at Columbia noted this and wondered what the effects would be. In 1999 I learned of one sad outcome. A friend from my high school class -- one of the very nicest women in high school -- got really screwed up after becoming a school teacher in New York City. She eventually committed suicide. I know I left NYC after two years because I didn't like living there. It's not fun being at the bottom of a dysfunctional pyramid.