“One problem I have with the whole ‘mental illness’ frame for talking about mass shooters,” Paul Campos writes at Lawyers, Guns & Money, “is that the ‘mental illness’ often appears to be garden variety authoritarian ethno-nationalist misogyny, with the misogyny being the really critical ideological lynchpin [sic].”

Campos is riffing on reports that Mauricio Garcia, who killed eight people at a Texas mall on May 6, was discharged from the US Army (before completing recruit training) over mental health concerns, and posted to social media — in between racist and misogynistic rants and applause for mass shootings, including one in 2014 in which “involuntary celibate” Elliot Rodger killed six — about his mental health problems.

Campos’s response raises interesting questions. Is it ever reasonable to blame “mental illness” for terrible ideas and violent behavior? If so, what are the metrics for distinguishing between individual responsibility and helpless derangement?

“The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility,” psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote in 1990’s  The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary. “With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion ‘I am sick’ as equivalent to the assertion ‘I am not responsible.'”

To be fair, Szasz wasn’t coming at this subject from out of the blue or from a previously neutral position.  He’s best known for a book he wrote three decades before The Untamed Young, the title of which gets right to his most well-known holding: The Myth of Mental Illness.

While Szasz is generally treated as a heretic for questioning the foundational principles of modern psychology/psychiatry, most US legal systems seem more Szaszian than establishmentarian on the subject.

About half of US states (including Texas) adhere to the “M’Naghten rule,” which only allows a “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict in cases where the defendant literally did not understand what he or she was doing, and/or that what he or she was doing was morally wrong.

Depression is not enough. A chip on your shoulder over supposed social mistreatment won’t get over the bar. “My father beat me daily with a belt when I was a kid so now I’m always angry” doesn’t cut it.

To use “mental illness” as an absolving trump card, one must have e.g. heard the supposed voice of a god giving orders to do the thing, or hallucinated that the victim was an alien assassin sent to abduct the children of Earth.

That seems like a reasonable standard to me. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with those who suffer from chemical imbalances in the brain, or who were abused as children, or who’ve become convinced that all their problems are someone else’s (or some other race’s or religion’s) fault.

But those people are, generally, living entirely or almost entirely in the real world. Whatever their problems or grievances, they retain agency in how they respond and react. They know that walking into a mall and gunning people down is wrong. If they choose to do that, it’s on them, not on their problems or their victims.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“House Democrats,” CBS News reports, “have taken their first procedural steps to try to force a House vote on a clean debt ceiling increase.” Absent such an increase, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen predicts the government will reach the end of its ability to borrow money as early as June 1.

What does a “clean” increase mean? It means no politician has to give up anything. Nobody on Capitol Hill or at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has to make any sacrifices. Congress just votes to increase the limit on a very special credit card, spent by it but billed to taxpayers (including future unborn generations).

It seems like magic. But, of course, magic isn’t real. And there’s nothing “clean” about the proposed debt ceiling increase. It’s a filthy scam played on Americans by politicians who believe — or at least hope — they’ll be retired or dead before the winds of reality blow down the house of cards they’re building.

And the silliest part is that it isn’t even remotely necessary — not even if the standard is “spend enough to continue having insanely large, burdensome, and intrusive government.”

“Clean debt ceiling raise” advocates insist that opposition to a rubber stamp on the government continuing to grow its spending faster than its revenues every year, forever, and continuing to borrow larger amounts of money every year than the year before, forever, is some kind of Dickensian scheme to steal grandma’s gruel, chain little Jimmy to a machine in a factory, and reduce the size and equipment of the US armed forces to that of a local Cub Scout troop.

But let’s look at some numbers.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the US government took in revenues of about $2.5 trillion and spent about $3.5 trillion in 2019.

Also according to OMB, the US government will take in revenues of about $3.5 trillion and will spend about $4.6 trillion this year.

Why am I leaving out the years in between? Because the COVID-19 pandemic provided at least a fig leaf of “emergency” justification for running large deficits and borrowing lots of money. Now that the pandemic is officially over, it’s time to stop playing “emergency” games.

If the US government limited itself to spending THIS year what it spent in 2019, its budget would be balanced.

Not what it spent in 1819.

Not what it spent in 1919.

What it spent four short years ago, when it was still bogged down in the 20-year Afghanistan war and blowing money like a drunken sailor on frippery like Donald Trump’s “border wall.”

Not that Republicans propose anything as draconian as, you know, spending less than they take in. They just want slight decreases in the acceleration of fiscal stupidity. But that might be a start.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday discussed the brutal slaying of five people in Texas,” the New York Post whines, “without noting the fugitive accused of the heinous crime is an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported four times.”

Francisco Oropesa, the subject of a continuing manhunt as I write this, allegedly murdered several of his neighbors after they complained about his noisy behavior (shooting in his back yard while intoxicated).

What does Oropesa’s immigration status have to do with anything? I’m tempted to say “nothing,” but on further thought this strikes me as a teachable moment.

The usual suspects, of course, want us to take this incident as confirmation that “illegal” immigration is an inherently terrible thing, and that the US government needs to dramatically increase its funding ($25 billion is the number in president Joe Biden’s 2023 budget request) and manpower (more than 40,000 government employees between the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement) dedicated to “immigration enforcement.”

The REAL lesson is that throwing tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people at “immigration enforcement,” turning a 100-mile strip around the edges of the United States into a “constitution-free” zone where native and immigrants alike are subjected to warrantless searches and other predatory government behavior, and abducting and deporting people multiple times:

HAS. NOT. WORKED.

Nor is it about to suddenly, magically START working.

The borders of the United States have always been open (by constitutional mandate until the late 1800s, when the Supreme Court decided to start ignoring the Constitution and just let Congress do whatever it felt like).

The borders of the United States are open now. People who want to get in, get in. Some of them are abducted and deported. And those who still want to be here get BACK in.

The borders of the United States will always be open. With 95,500 miles of border and coastline, “securing the border” wouldn’t be an option even if the government put every member of the US armed forces, plus every state and local cop, on nothing but the business of “securing the border.”

Our choices are:

1. Open borders; or
2. Open borders AND a $25-billion, 40,000-guard, 100-mile-wide police state dedicated to the preposterous claim that we can have something other than open borders.

Pick one.

Either way,  Oropoesa’s victims remain exactly as dead as they would be if he was from Peoria.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY