As always happens in the wake of a mass shooting, last week when Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people at his former Florida high school, commentators spared not a moment to take to the airwaves to bemoan the government’s alleged inattentiveness to the issue of “mental health” or “mental illness.”
And Republicans, i.e. self-described conservatives, were at least as prone as their liberal Democratic counterparts to offer this response.
Few people think through the implications of this line—yet there are many.
First, it is telling that the proponents of “limited government” and “personal accountability” should lament what they evidently think is a failure on the part of the federal government to be sufficiently aggressive in tampering with the minds of its citizens.
Second, the federal government has already spent, and continues to spend, billions of dollars—all taxpayers’ monies, bear in mind—on “mental health” services. Yet “conservative” Republicans don’t think that the Therapeutic State is expansive enough.
Third, those who insist upon identifying “mental health” as the cause, or at least a cause, of mass shootings, usually do so only with respect to: (a) a certain class of mass shootings—school shootings; and (b) a certain class of shooters—young, predominantly white, school shooters.
When suspected Islamic terrorists drive a truck into a crowd, fly jets into skyscrapers, or shoot up a military installation, there is remarkably little said about the “mental health” challenges of the perpetrators. When non-white gangbangers, irrespectively of their ages, or organized criminals of any ethnicity or age commit atrocities, no one talks about “mental health.”
This is telling, for what it…