We’re only 47 days into 2018, and a total of 30 mass shootings have occurred in the United States. Florida’s massacre at a Parkland high school has ramped up the calls for the U.S. government to reopen inpatient psychiatric facilities that were closed due to meddling by liberal politicians in the 1970s.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, is charged with 17 counts of murder and is being held without bond. He was expelled from the same high school for fighting and bringing bullets to school. He has been in and out of mental health treatment, but Florida law allowed him to legally purchase a AR-15 rifle and other firearms despite his mental illness.
President Trump also signed legislation loosening restrictions on the mentally ill purchasing firearms.
Video obtained by TMZ shows Cruz wearing a “Make America Great Again” ball cap while target shooting with a pistol in the backyard of a friend’s mobile home.
With his mental health history Cruz would have qualified for a longterm inpatient stay at a mental hospital — if the government had not cut funding for mental hospitals.
In the 1950s, 560,000 patients were cared for in mental hospitals in the U.S. That number has declined to only 45,000 patients in recent years.
As a result of the government’s civil rights policies, longterm mentally ill patients were discharged into the community, and federal policies offered little “community alternative treatment” other than jails and prisons.
According to the NY Times: “Mental health treatment should be provided in a seamless continuum that ranges from outpatient care, to community services and supportive housing, to inpatient medical care.
“But the system is so utterly disjointed, uncoordinated and poorly funded, that those who need help, instead end up in jails and prisons, or warehoused in nursing homes and other group housing facilities.”
