Nora Dimitrova Clinton over at Legal Insurrection gives us a comparison that is both stark and timely: 

Those who live by Western tradition, Judeo-Christian values, and American core principles mourn their heroes with respect, dignity, and courage. They celebrate life and peacefully honor the departed hero’s legacy.

Those who live by woke radicalism worship criminals instead. There is no sorrowful solemnity. There is no dignified respect in their demeanor after the death of their symbols, who often perish as a result of a lawful arrest or self-defense. Instead, their reaction is marked by vandalism, arson, violence, and the revolutionary chaos of unhinged crowds, intent on dismantling the system. The woke mob does not respect human life but celebrates death. Its goal is the destruction of the status quo at any cost. 

I’ve spent a good deal of time today monitoring the attack at a Mormon church in Michigan, so this passage from Nora hits pretty hard.

The information I have at the moment is that 10 people were shot, two fatally. Reports from first responders at the scene say that the perpetrator is dead after having rammed a vehicle (most likely a pickup that was rigged with IEDs) into the building through the front door, setting the place on fire, and then shooting.
 
Whoever the attacker is, what we saw there is certainly an act of someone bent on, as Nora suggests, destruction of the status quo at any cost.  

I was already writing a piece on the mass shooting today in North Carolina when the Michigan story broke. It was at that moment that the commonality between all these recent attacks clicked for me.

Perhaps you've not heard about the North Carolina incident, so I'll touch on it here. Nigel “Max” Edge, 40, of Oak Island, faces three counts of first-degree murder, five counts of attempted murder, and five counts of assault with a deadly weapon following the incident at the Southport Waterfront Bar and the American Fish Company Restaurant. He’s being held today without bond and will be making an appearance in court tomorrow. According to a Newsweek report,

Coring said the suspect in custody “identifies as a combat veteran, he self-identified as injured in the line of duty,” adding that he says he “suffers from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”
…
They also confirmed on Sunday that “Mr. Nigel Edge actually changed his name some years ago,” adding that they are working to identify “all of his past.”
...
One authority referred to him as “Sean,” and according to public records that Newsweek obtained, he previously identified as Sean DeBevoise. Records show that DeBevoise had several hunting and fishing licenses across states, including North Dakota, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.Public records also show that DeBevoise also had several run ins with the law, though none of the six offenses were specified, they took place in North Carolina in 2006, 2008, and 2015.   

At the moment, it is unclear if the North Carolina case is anything approaching political in nature, but it seems clear that  mental illness involved. That seems to be the common element in a lot of these incidents. It also seems clear that in both cases I’ve mentioned here, there was some serious planning and preparation involved.

In the North Carolina case, one question that pops up immediately is: How did he manage to gain that firearm with his lengthy record? I mean, this thing had red flags all over it.

We don’t know enough about the case in Michigan at this point to even ask the right questions, but the attack seems consistent with attacks we’ve seen on other faith communities. Speaking of that, let’s not forget the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting. It's certainly of a piece with what we saw this morning.  Mental issues were at or near the root. What sane person attacks a church in this fashion? We have had four such attacks on Christian churches in the last two months. Can we call this a trend, or will we be be told we're hateful? 

The parallels make one mindful of Bill Clinton intoning how he saw churches burning regularly. I wonder how many actually remember that story. Does anyone remember he signed an anti- church burning law back in July of 1996? As I pointed out at the time, arson was already a crime.

Earlier this month, PJ Media's Athena Thorne noted the link to mental issues not being dealt with adequately, pointing out a previous piece in which she said:

Most advanced societies throughout history have created institutions of some sort to segregate the mentally ill from the general public. This is certainly a fair policy for normal people who are trying to go about their lives. But in practice, it often meant the institutionalized lived in deplorable conditions. Additionally, people were sometimes “put away” by others who had personal, financial, or political motives. So asylums were always (rightly) susceptible to skepticism but understood to be necessary.

Then, in the 1960s, advances in antipsychotic medicine created speculation that the severely mentally ill would be able to live an unconfined life in society again. Also beginning at this time, the large public mental health facilities, which had chiefly been financed and run by the individual states, began to be influenced by changes in financial policy. There were also a series of legal decisions over the years that chipped away at civilians’ right to enjoy a secure, peaceful society. And finally, the injection of federal money and policy into the mental health system eventually wrested the operation of large institutions away from the states that had traditionally maintained them. Medicaid incentivized states to close their facilities, and in 1981, the federal government ceased funding in-patient facilities and forced the mentally ill onto the community.

That’s when murder rates, particularly mass murder rates, spiked comparatively higher than Hunter Biden on a bender. Athena went on to describe several then-recent incidents, which she correctly points out were quite preventable.
 
Were there killings by mentally challenged people before we basically eliminated longterm commitment of such people? Certainly. Such attacks were comparatively rare, however. Since then, not so much.
 
What was one of the big reasons for turning these people loose? As is typical with government healthcare, the conditions they were kept in were downright horrible. VA hospitals, county homes for the aged, etc. all suffer from the same institutional issues. The objection to being institutionalized, given those conditions, is understandable, of course. The solution they came to was worse than the cure, and puts all Americans at significantly higher risk.
 
Athena points out correctly that President Donal Trump has been working on that problem, trying to get such people off the streets and into proper care. That move, particularly after the large number of recent high-profile cases where the perp was mentally challenged, is gaining in popularity. However, actual movement on the issue is slow at best.
 
Part of the cause of that slowness is that prior to the early '80s such mental health issues were dealt with at the state level. Returning to that system will be problematic.

The financially challenged states are going to understandably resist having this ball back in their court. Attacking the issue at the federal level will eventually deteriorate to where we were about 1975 or so, when people saw what was happening and decided to turn the patients loose.

So how then do we address this issue and save lives, while not allowing the conditions such people are kept in from becoming worse than any prison? How do we avoid the abuses Athena speaks of?

Perhaps the largest issue is the very definition of mental illness. The key to proper solutions is proper problem identification, and we seem averse to properly identify these problems because someone might get offended.
 
The higher-profile cases we’ve seen since, say, the '9’s have often involved gender fluidity, transsexualism, etc. That’s been pointed out time and again, and then basically ignored, other than the brief mention. There is certainly an uptick in such attacks. The Post Millennial  does a fair job of listing some of these. As I write this, a report crosses my desk from the Washington Post, saying that the shooting attack on ICE facilities in Alvarado, Texas, has been linked to trans and anti-fascist activism. The Post leaps up to thwart what seems an obvious, if somewhat ill-defined, link:

The number of incidents is still small compared to the much larger amount of right-wing violence in America, according to several studies, including a University of Maryland examination that found far-right extremists were responsible for nearly twice as many violent acts as the far-left from 1948-2018.

Now why would they be stretching the figures back that far? That’s an easy one: they’re doing that out of a need to distort the perception of what the figures are saying about our current situation. How many trans people even admitted to being such in the late '40s and early '50s? Is there a direct link? 

It’s a delicate issue, but I think it’s needful that we address it. 

All these recent attacks seem to have mental issues at their core. It's time to start looking more seriously at that aspect no matter whom it “offends” if we want to solve the problem. Lives are at stake.

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