NEW YORK TIMES Column: …In the wake of the massacres in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., there have been essentially two central arguments about the cause. Liberals have stressed the need for new gun regulations that would make it more difficult for the likes of James Holmes and Adam Lanza to get ahold of killing machines like semiautomatics. There is no lack of sensible ideas: background checks for all gun purchasers, a national registry that would allow guns to be traced, an assault weapons ban, controls on ammunition, and so on. Nouriel Roubini, the economist, wrote in a Twitter message that gun owners should be required to have liability insurance, an intriguing idea. Some legislators who once blindly followed the bidding of the National Rifle Association are now saying they are reconsidering in the wake of Newtown.
Many conservatives, however, have placed the blame for the recent rash of mass shootings not on the proliferation of guns but on the fact that James Holmes and Adam Lanza were allowed to go about their business unfettered, despite their obvious mental illness. The editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal recently wrote that changing the way we treat the mentally ill “strikes us as a more promising path” for reducing mass killings than a fight over gun control.
In truth, both are necessary. If conservatives need to face the need for gun regulations — controls that will make guns less ubiquitous while still staying on the right side of the Second Amendment — liberals need to acknowledge that untreated mental illness is also an important part of the reason mass killings take place. Yes, it is true, as has been noted in recent weeks, that most mentally ill people don’t commit crimes. But it is equally true that anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill… (more)
It wasn’t the “liberals” who slashed mental health budgets and cut Medicaid for the mentally ill. That started under Ronald Reagan.