The
political response to Friday’s horrible shooting at the Sandy Hook
School in Newtown, Connecticut has focused first and foremost on
issues related to gun ownership, the Second Amendment, and gun
control. As Jacob Sullum
noted earlier today, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and
President Barack Obama have called for “meaningful action” when it
comes to stopping other mass slaughters. Yet neither seems capable
of outlining exactly what steps regarding gun violence should be
taken or precisely how they will be effective in stopping events
that are thankfully as rare and they are awful. From banning
certain types of guns arbitrarily designated as “assault weapons”
to limiting high-capacity magazines to insisting on better or more
complete federal background checks, it’s not clear how such
measures would stop or minimize mass shooters. 

On top of that, you can layer a generally positive feeling
toward guns and gun rights in the country, recent Supreme Court
rulings that substantiate a wider reading of the Second Amendment,
and decades-long trend toward liberalization of gun laws around the
country. All this adds up to a political reality that will almost
certainly minimize any sort of gun-control legislation, no matter
how much its proponents push in that direction.

Because of that, I suspect that the real fallout from the Sandy
Springs shooting will be in areas related to mental health,
especially in terms of increasing funding for various programs to
identify and treat people suspected of having issues. The
highest-profile mass shootings in recent memory – think of the
Aurora, Colorado shooting from the summer, Jared Lee Loughner’s
2011 rampage in Arizona, and the Virginia Tech spree by Seung-Hui
Cho – all involved people who not only were clearly unbalanced but
who had “slipped through the cracks” of the mental health system in
one way or another. The Sandy Springs shooter, Adam Lanza, also
fits this bill, which is simultaneously comforting (these people
are nuts) and terrifying (and they walked among us).

Particularly after Loughner’s mass shooting,
there were many calls for strengthening policies that would allow
for easier involuntary commitment of people suspected of potential
violence. As the prominent psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey
wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “These tragedies are the
inevitable outcome of five decades of failed mental-health
policies.” He continued:

The solution to this situation is obvious—make sure individuals
with serious mental illnesses are receiving treatment. The mistake
was not in emptying the nation’s hospitals but rather in ignoring
the treatment needs of the patients being released. Many such
patients will take medication voluntarily if it is made available
to them. Others are unaware they are sick and should be required by
law to receive assisted outpatient treatment, including medication
and counseling, as is the case in New York under Kendra’s Law. If
they do not comply with the court-ordered treatment plan, they can
and should be involuntarily admitted to a hospital.

Fuller’s basic reaction was widely shared across the political
spectrum. Expect it to be revived in a big way in the wake of
Lanza’s shooting. In Time, Texas AM’s Christopher J.
Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice
writes,

Our country’s funding for mental-health services has only gotten
worse since the 2008 recession. As the National Alliance on Mental
Illness has
been warning for some time, the existing level of funding
is inadequate, so our nation’s ability to identify and care for the
severely mentally ill has been hamstrung.

I think it’s far more likely that this sort of argument will
find a far warmer reception among legislators and the general
public. There’s no National Rifle Association pushing back against
increasing funding for any and all sorts of interventions into
mental health (however broadly that term will be defined). As
important, members of Congress will be able to use increased
spending on these issues as a way of sending money home to their
districts, where parents increasingly define any and all
personality tics in their kids as something to be wary of. Only
oddball civil libertarians will worry about easing the ability to
involuntarily commit people and/or track self-evidently odd people
in the classroom and workplace. School officials already have a
counseling framework in place that wil readily absorb more staff
and money. Mental health and other counseling services will
piggyback easily onto the build out of Obamacare.

While I doubt any of that activity will make us safer from mass
shootings – such events are so rare as is it seems highly unlikely
that stopping them completely can be accomplished – it will allay
many people’s understandable fears and anxieties. And a few years
down the road, when mass shootings haven’t increased (because
they haven’t been increasing), this sort of action will be
given the credit for avoiding another Sandy Hook School
shooting.