Time to reconsider how society handles the unstable

Yet again, another school shooting has happened. At this point, we’ve largely become desensitized to it. I’m not going to talk about guns because others have written extensively on the subject from both sides. Getting guns off the street is entirely unrealistic. Anyone who argues for it is not looking to solve the problem.

Instead, I’m going to talk about a cold hard truth: we need to start locking up crazy people again. Every single one of these school shooters was a psychopath. None of them were normal people that broke after a few bad turns. They were deeply disturbed individuals that creeped out everyone who encountered them years before their attack. They were not “weird,” “kooky,” or “strange.”

Locking these types of people up protects us from them and them from themselves. At one point in America’s history, we did that, and it worked. The problem was that liberal compassion wasn’t okay with it anymore and Republicans were too cheap to want to pay for “funny farms” anymore.

So, a bill was passed in the California Legislature to ban insane asylums; due to it having bi-partisan support,

Governor Ronald Reagan (mistakenly) signed it into law. Following California, every other state eventually banned these asylums. This caused an explosion in the homeless population in the country that we still suffer from to this day. Most homeless people are deeply mentally ill, incapable of holding down a job, or living a normal life. They used to be given a clean bed and three meals a day. Now, more compassionately, we let them live under bridges and in public parks.

This is also burden on our law enforcement. They are the ones that must deal with these ticking time bombs. Most people don’t account for how many lunatics decide to lash out against police officers or, in the worst-case scenario, commit suicide by cop. This causes over policing because police must potentially treat everyone as a possible psycho. Our local leadership, Reps. VanSchoiack and Hurlbert, should propose legislation to bring back these asylums. I think this is a greater priority than, yet again, cutting taxes in Missouri for large corporations that hate America.

Michael Pyles Trimble, Mo.

Publisher Emeritus Steve Tinnen

Jamey & D’Anna Honeycutt