How many “odd” people do you have to sift through in order to find the “dangerous” ones? What level of reliability is there in psychiatric diagnosis? How many false negative and false positives are there?
Do we really want to give this much power to psychiatric professionals, many of whom believe conservatives, especially people who like guns, are by definition mentally ill, dangerously so?
What we have here is a case of severe hindsightitis. Like the morons that claimed 911 or Pearl Harbor could have been prevented. Which is of course true, had intelligence analysts lined up half a dozen of the many thousands of snippets of information coming through and drawn the appropriate conclusions.
But in real life, do you have any idea how many “odd” people the cops deal with? About the loud uproar that would follow from “human rights activists” if they started rounding up all who don’t “fit in?”
It is a difficult problem. Heck, there ARE people who shouldn’t be walking the streets, and society once DID find a way to get them off the streets. I think everyone can agree that there are indeed people who shouldn’t be living at large in society.
The question is, where does one draw the line at “YOU can live in society” and “You CANNOT live in society”...
But, as another poster said, it is also true that giving the government powers of incarceration for mental status CAN (and did) end up with tyrannical states like the Soviet Union using it for their own ends.
We were taking people off the streets at one time in this country without being the Soviet Union, and while it is true that the conditions in many of those places were bad, it was also true that it likely wouldn’t be worse than what many of those people had on the street, except that someone else was paying for it.