Imagine If Jerry Falwell Had Said Something Like This...

They would have been screeching night and day about it--even worse than Don Imus's offensive remarks. These are far worse--but this isn't a national news story--because it was said by a Muslim, and therefore liberals must genuflect to show their support for diversity:

A community debate over religious freedom surfaced in Western Pennsylvania last week when Dutch feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who has lived under the threat of death for denouncing her Muslim upbringing, made an appearance at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

Islamic leaders tried to block the lecture, which was sponsored through an endowment from the Frank J. and Sylvia T. Pasquerilla Lecture Series. They argued that Hirsi Ali's attacks against the Muslim faith in her book, "Infidel," and movie, "Submission," are "poisonous and unjustified" and create dissension in their community.

Although university officials listened to Islamic leaders' concerns, the lecture planned last year took place Tuesday evening under tight security, with no incidents.

Imam Fouad ElBayly, president of the Johnstown Islamic Center, was among those who objected to Hirsi Ali's appearance.

"She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death," said ElBayly, who came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1976.

Instapundit turned it around nicely:

When you come into the United States you must abide by the laws and customs that prevail here. You're supposed to leave this kind of medieval idiocy behind. If you keep it up, don't be surprised if you get thought of as some sort of medieval idiot.

ElBayly does not seem to have crossed the line into directly saying that someone should kill Hirsi Ali, so I guess that he hasn't actually broken any laws--but compared to what Don Imus said, this is far worse. And you won't hear a word about it from the usual screeching heads on television.

There Are Things Worse Than Gun Accidents

The gun control movement works very, very hard to give you the impression that lots of kids get killed in gun accidents. It isn't true. Every such accident is a tragedy, and one that doesn't need to happen.

You do have your gun properly secured, right? I hope so--not just to protect your child, or your child's friend, but to make sure a burglar doesn't use it on you.

But stories like this are a reminder that there are situations worse than a gun accident. Much worse:

Tied up and left to die in a burning apartment, a Columbia student used the blaze set by her sadistic rapist to free herself, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.

"It appears she was able to escape as a result of the fire," Kelly said. "She was tied, and the flame was used by her to break the bond."

The 23-year-old woman, identified by sources as a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, endured 19 hours of rape and torture at the hands of a sick creep in her Hamilton Heights apartment Friday night.

In what Kelly called a "particularly vicious" assault, the fiend tied his victim to a bed, cut her, raped her, burned her with scalding water and chemicals - and then set the woman's futon on fire to cover up the crime, police said.

He was so brutal he slit her eyelids, Kelly said.

The student used the flames to free herself and fled her fifth-floor apartment with her hands still bound to each other to get help from a neighbor, officials said.

Bitter over at The Bitch Girls linked to this story after explaining that this is why she has a pistol on her nightstand.

The Sky Is About to Fall

Hell is about to freeze over. Watch out for those flying pigs! I just saw Senator Schumer (D-NY) on The O'Reilly Factor admit that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. He went on to argue that the right isn't unlimited, just like the First Amendment "doesn't protect pornography." He even acknowledged that there is a right to defend yourself, and that can even include using a gun to do so.

Now, I don't believe for a second that Schumer's definition of "reasonable regulation" of guns matches mine, but this is real progress. Either that, or he has already figured out that the Supreme Court is going to uphold Parker v. D.C. (D.C.App. 2007), and is figuring out how to hamstring that right so badly that it is meaningless.

UPDATE: Professor Volokh points out that this isn't the first time that Schumer has acknowledged that the Second Amendment protects an individual right--although subject to regulation that most people would consider unreasonable.

Mental Illness and Mass Murder

I'm glad that a few other people are prepared to say it. From today's Wall Street Journal:

I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.

From the left marched battalions of self-styled mental health "liberation activists" steeped in the writings of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Though he denied being opposed to his own profession, Laing's notion that madness could be a reasonable reaction to an unjust society, or even a vehicle for spiritual transformation, helped fuel the anti-psychiatry movement of the post Love-In era. The most radical of Laingians carried revisionism one step further: Not only wasn't psychosis a bad thing, it was evidence of a superior level of consciousness.

The libertarians were fueled by Thomas Szasz, an iconoclastic psychiatrist who was, and remains, an outspoken foe of virtually every aspect of his chosen specialty. Hungarian-born in 1920, and witness to vicious state exploitation of medical practice by the Nazis and the communists, Dr. Szasz pushed an absolutist dogma of individual choice, finding ready converts among members of the Do-Your-Own-Thing generation. Though his early essays offered much-needed critiques of the Orwellian nightmares that can result when autocracy corrupts health care, Dr. Szasz devolved into something of a psychiatric Flat-Earther, insisting in the face of mounting contrary evidence that mental illness simply does not exist. Currently, he serves on a commission, cofounded with the Church of Scientology, that purports to investigate human rights violations perpetrated by mental health professionals.

Accepting the arguments of the liberationists and the libertarians at face value led to the assertion that no matter how bizarre, disabling or life-threatening a person's hallucinations and delusions, involuntary treatment was never called for. And to the assertion that violation of that premise created yet another class of political prisoners.

While moderate members of the anti-asylum movement were willing to concede that psychosis might pose difficulties for a few individuals, they insisted that society had no more right to force psychoactive drugs upon mental patients than it did to hold down diabetics for insulin injections. If treatment was to be offered, it needed to be consensually contracted between caregivers and care-recipients on an outpatient basis. That fit perfectly with the sensibilities of conservative scrooges searching for ways to cut the state budget, and all too happy to dismantle a massive state hospital system denigrated as inefficient at best and inhumane at worst. The replacement chosen was an untested, less costly treatment model: the community mental center.

How nice that everyone agreed.

Everyone, that was, except for many families of hospitalized, hopelessly-decompensated, often self-destructive and occasionally violent psychotics. They'd lived with the reality of severe mental illness and wondered what "freedom" would bring. But there weren't enough of these families to matter.

...

By the time I received my doctorate in 1974, the doors to many of the locked wards had been flung open and the much vaunted community mental health centers were being built--predominately in low-rent neighborhoods. A few years later, government funding for these allegedly humane treatment outposts had been cut, as yet more fiscal belt-tightening was inspired by findings that they didn't work.

Because crazy people rarely showed up for treatment voluntarily, and when they did, the treatment milieu consisted of queuing up interminably at Thorazine Kiosks.

And now we had a Homeless Problem.

And everyone was astonished.

Estimates vary but there's no doubt that a significant percentage of people living on heating vents, pushing their belongings in shopping carts, squatting in city parks and immersed in the squalor of tent cities suffer from severe mental disease. And their psychosis is often exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse--what is, essentially, a regimen of self-medication that should make a Szaszian proud.

Many of these unfortunates end up as victims of violent crimes. A few become victimizers and when they do, watch out. For though it is true that schizophrenics are responsible for a proportionally lower rate of violent offenses than the general population (because many forms of the disease engender passivity and physical inactivity), when crazy people do act out the results are often horrific: bloody spree killings ignited by paranoid thinking and the angry urgings of internal voices.

Which brings us to outrages such as the Virginia Tech massacre.

Diagnosis from afar is the purview of talk-shows hosts and other charlatans, and I will not attempt to detail the psyche of the Virginia Tech slaughterer. But I will hazard that much of what has been reported about his pre-massacre behavior--prolonged periods of asocial mutism and withdrawal, irrational anger and hatred, bizarre writing and speech--is not at odds with the picture of a fulminating, serious mental disease. And his age falls squarely within the most common period when psychosis blossoms.

No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous "counseling"--an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to "treatment" for a patient with metastasized cancer.

But even that minimal care wasn't given. The shooter didn't want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it's been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a "Behavioral Health Center" in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.

This Texas Law Review paper by Bernard Harcourt examines institutionalization--as measured by both prison and mental hospital inmates. He makes the shocking discovery that if you combine both measures and plot them against U.S. murder rates for the period 1928-2000, there is an almost perfect negative correlation: as institutionalization (in either prison or mental hospitals) goes up, murder rates go down, and vice versa.

There's a lot of evidence that many of those who are currently locked up in prisons are mentally ill. It would appear that the great experiment of the 1960s--deinstitutionalization--simply transferred violent mentally ill people from mental hospitals to prisons, after a few decades of suffering, both by those mental patients, and by the society as a whole.

Can I Find an Ambulance-Chaser to File a Fault Advertising Claim?

This should be worth at least several million dollars. I noticed this advertising that United Airlines had it up in the Denver International Airport terminal:


Click to enlarge

One would conclude that their new regional jets are actually an evolved form of butterfly, or perhaps as beautiful as butterflies--or maybe as low impact on the environment as a butterfly?

Or most likely, some advertising creative guy could not figure out a coherent message that would make people happy, and settled for this.

Amusing Examination of Nasty Capitalists Laying People Off

Jim Geraghty observes:

As you’ll recall from yesterday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is upset with Circuit City for laying off 3,400 workers, wagging her finger to management in a letter that declared, “these decisions are inconsistent with the fundamental compact between your company and its employees. This is the wrong way to deal with the economic pressures of the day — and the wrong way to treat workers who’ve given their all to your company.”

Hillary doesn’t mention it in the letter, but one presumes she believes that the company has spent too much on other areas.

Then he marshals the evidence that suggests that the layoff of 75 workers at Simon & Schuster were caused by the $8 million advance that they gave an author named...Hillary Clinton several years that seems unlikely to ever be covered by royalties.

Was that just a bad call on the expected sales of the book? Or a disguised personal gift from a publishing company to a politician?

Another Tragedy of Our Mental Health System, But This Won't Get As Much Press

First, because there was only person killed, and second, because it didn't involve a gun. From the April 19, 2007 Santa Rosa (Cal.) Press-Democrat:

The family of a man who allegedly stabbed his mother to death at her Rohnert Park home wrestled Wednesday with grief and their anger at a mental health system that they say failed everyone involved.

"A broken heart and a broken system, that's what I'm feeling today," Dave Cooper said.

Cooper's mother-in-law, Jeanne Elaine Hoyt, 61, was stabbed multiple times with a sword and died Tuesday night, authorities said.

Ezra Timothy Hoyt, 33, a paranoid schizophrenic, was holding a sword when he was arrested at gunpoint in front of his mother's house as she was being treated inside, police said.

Jeanne Hoyt was rushed to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 6:44 p.m., Rohnert Park Police Lt. Jeff Taylor said.

Her son, who Cooper said was living in a group home in Santa Rosa, is being held without bail at the Sonoma County Jail, facing a charge of murder.

He was holding what is believed to be the murder weapon when police arrived at his mother's home in the Rancho Grande mobile home park on Snyder Lane. Police and fire crews were dispatched to the home at 6:09 p.m. in response to a "frantic 911 call," Taylor said.

He did not say who called 911.

The sword was a rapier, "long, slender, sharply pointed," and Hoyt dropped it at an officer's command, Taylor said.

A distraught Cooper suggested that the family's efforts to get Ezra Hoyt timely and proper help were frustrated by the mental health system.

"It's the way the social services system works -- or doesn't work," he said. "All we're told, of course, is that nothing can be done until until he becomes a threat to himself or others."

Cooper said family members had worried that Hoyt wasn't taking medication for the illness with which he'd been diagnosed about five years ago.

"He's over 18, he can't be forced to stay on his medications until something happens," Cooper said. "Well, something has happened."

This is a tragedy. Like a lot of other mental illness tragedies that I have talked about on this blog in the last several years, those who become violent are a small minority of the mentally ill (most of whom are a bigger threat to themselves than to others). But the unpredictability of a violent mentally ill person--and that they may attack people who have no idea that they are seen as targets--creates enormous fear in the general population.

Unlike what happened at Virginia Tech last Monday, no gun control law would have prevented this tragedy. But like Virginia Tech, a mental illness commitment law that wasn't quite so far out on the civil libertarian extreme might well have prevented this tragedy.