New York Times columnist Joe Nocera writes that E. Fuller Torrey “believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge. In this, however, he is an outlier. The mainstream sentiment among mental health professionals is that there is no going back to the bad-old days when people who were capable of living on their own were locked up for years in mental hospitals. The truth is, the kind of symptoms Elliot Rodger showed were unlikely to get him confined in any case. And without a history of confinement, he had every legal right to buy a gun . . . Instead of focusing on making it harder for the mentally ill to get guns, maybe we should be making it harder to get guns, period.
Guns and Mental Illness (New York Times)
