Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan has been following gunplay in the Old West. There's
one set of rationalizations when people go around the bend in Montana. "Open carry, permitless concealed carry, everybody armed to the teeth, drifts of drunk depressed delusional army vets dotting the hills like a host of golden daffodils." And troubled Montanans, even people known to be seriously troubled, aren't committed.
Says here there are three veteran-focused public mental hospitals in the state, and though a lot of the people listed here are all wrong for a vet with trauma, the list is very long. I understand the distance problem, but he clearly should have been resident in a hospital while getting treatment and of course someone should have taken his guns away if he was so dangerous to others. Are we going to be hearing from any of his family?
Okay. Family claims relevant hospitals turned him down. Need for more detail here. No primary care doc to prescribe meds? And why does a delusional schizophrenic who scares his family have guns? Why did the NFL shooter have guns? Why did this absolutely insane woman who killed her four daughters have guns?
Fact is, states like Montana get their high gun violence (suicide and homicide) rate because people there care much more about personal liberty than community safety. There’s a reason we call it the wild west.
It's not much different elsewhere, she notes, because the culture-studies rhetoric makes community safety arbitrary, and probably oppressive.
[A]ny intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
She's being hyperbolic to make a point, and yet, some sixty years ago, Sensitive People responded to the likes of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by
mainstreaming the looneys rather than looking more carefully at what sorts of treatments for people resident in the mental institutions worked (which might have been
the better way to end the frontal lobotomies and shock therapy and all the rest). It's not that
I haven't warned you.
Culture-studies normativity intrudes on the skepticism. What happens next is not amusing. "[Scholarship is] defensible only to the extent that researchers conduct their work with a sober sense of purpose and in a way that respects the moral status of other people. The other, which may have its roots in postmodern thinking, is that science per se disrespects the moral status of other people: pick any pejorative ending in -centric and reflect." (But the former representative's speech primarily addressed the disrespect of the moral status of people born female: do we accuse the dominant ideology of transcentrism?)
Yes, the looneys are people with a moral status, and yet, don't the people beset by looneys also have moral status?
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