Everyone is covering the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer. I’m surprised the New York Times led with the word “manhunt” today in their morning email, because their coverage is tying editorial knots, being very sure to note that law enforcement referred to the perpetrator as “he,” while avoiding gendered pronouns (“the person”) as if it were bubonic plague.
[Editor: Just after publication, per President Trump and law enforcement, the alleged killer is in custody.]
I do have a hot take, though I hope I’m wrong. I think the person who killed Kirk is dead by their own hand. I am sure the killer will be found, and hopefully quickly. I hope I’m wrong, and they find the killer and apply the death penalty. Gunning a public figure down with a hunting rifle is one of two things: evil, or insanity. Perhaps a share of both. My biggest worry is that they’ll find the killer, and that person will be charismatic and motivated, which will attract certain people to view the piece of garbage as a celebrity, like some do with Luigi Mangione, the garbage who murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Fox News is already talking about “similarities.” Gross.
The tells of where some of this is going are obvious. Certain corners of the conspiracy web reported law enforcement leaks, which are not reliable in my mind, claiming that some unspent ammunition had transgender “manifesto” writing on it. Social media is eating itself over this, which is, obviously, unhealthy.
To dispense with one of the more ridiculous ideas, the shot was made from 200 yards, using a Mauser bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle. Some are claiming this is a special feat, requiring Ethan Hunt-level marksmanship. That’s completely false. U.S. Marine Annual Rifle Qualification (ARQ) requirements score firing drills from 500 yards and closer, using iron sights; a 200-yard “kill” shot is passing for the “Marksman” score, hit 60 percent of the time, prone, aimed. Any decent Marine can make the 200-yard shot, not to mention the other armed services, or any fairly experienced hunter.
But being a decent shot with a rifle is not a sign of mental wellness. The story is going toward this armed killer transgender narrative, and I can see the sides lining up even now. I’d barely be surprised if someone hasn’t claimed the killer was one of the Zizians. (I can’t begin to describe how awful, violent, and strange the Zizians are, but I wrote about them.)
The Zizians are loony. They are crazy. They should all, to a person, be committed to a mental institution. But we can’t do that, because our laws no longer allow us to commit people that way, and even if we could, there aren’t places to put them. That’s what I want to talk about today. Our federal government spends $10.8 billion (FY 2024 budget) on Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMSA), and ICE’s budget is $9.7 billion—but DHS spends over $100 billion protecting our borders. Most of SAMSA’s money goes to overdose prevention, suicide prevention, and school-based programs. The total spent on drug courts, justice programs and diversion programs is $32.5 million, in the form of grants that are capped at under a half million dollars each. This is woefully inadequate to the problem.
I admit: I “cheated.” I used ChatGPT to provide statistics and historical comparisons. I also broke a rule. I didn’t have time to bother cross-checking every figure, so I’ll admit they may be wrong. But I am fairly confident in the trend. Since the 1950s, the U.S. has lost 95 percent of its mental health beds in long-term facilities. And laws have tilted away from public protection towards personal rights, making it far more difficult to commit crazy people against their own wishes.
This was done because there were abuses in the old system of sanitariums and commitment procedures. People would warehouse their problem kids away for things that don’t approach mental illness. We don’t want “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” But we also don’t want subways, commuter trains, and Army bases littered with very sick people, carrying knives, rifles, and other weapons. We have “red flag” laws supposedly preventing mentally ill people from buying guns, but those laws frequently don’t work, because they depend on records from systems that aren’t regularly updated.
America has all kinds of courts and justice systems. We have FISA courts, which are secret. We have immigration courts. And we have drug courts. I think we need to greatly expand and create a new, large category of courts for mental health. I think we should take facilities like Alligator Alcatraz and make them into mental health diagnostic and classification facilities. People who are exhibiting signs of mental illness should be given their hearing, and then with much lower thresholds for “danger to others,” moved to a place where they can be observed. In the 1960s, we found abuses in state lunatic asylums. Instead of fixing the issues, we closed the facilities and put crazy people on the streets.
Now we have streets filled with drug addicts, crazy homeless people. Some are aggressive. Some are violent. Some present a continuing danger to the public. Decarlos Brown Jr. killed 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte Area Transit System train. He had been in and out of jail, and mental lockup, for most of his adult life. But there was nowhere to send him, so he was on the street pending his next hearing. Endless hearings.
There is a plea that felony defendants can make if they, and their lawyer, believe that they are not competent to stand trial. Pleading “insanity,” means that the perpetrator doesn’t have the mental capacity for agency in his crime. We spend so much time and effort protecting the rights of people who, at trial, could claim they have no agency at all. If they don’t have agency, they shouldn’t have the same rights as people who do.
The legal thresholds for commitment need to be re-examined, and I believe, lowered. If someone chooses to live homeless, even when liberal city and state governments offer them free housing, that is a sign of mental illness. They should be examined and committed until they are willing to live like members of society. But the laws protect their “right” to live like madmen (and women). People like the Zizians should, without exception, be put in lockup.
And people like Decarlos Brown, Jr. should never have seen the outside of a lunatic asylum after exhibiting continued violent behavior toward his family. Nobody knows what to do with crazy people—even the Air Force and the Army let mentally ill members walk the streets with access to weapons. These people went on to commit mass shootings. There needs to be a clear policy, nationwide, to deal with our crazy people problem.
If we have a trillion dollar defense budget, we should be able to spend $50 billion to make a mental health protection system, along with courts, confinement, diagnostics, classification, and enough beds to house the people who deserve a social “time-out” from our streets. Yes, some of them should make their visit short, and get out when they become well again. But some should never set foot outside again.
This would do so much to clean up our country, stop the flood of mass shootings, random stabbings, and targeted high-profile killings. Whoever killed Charlie Kirk may well be someone who should have been in a lunatic asylum. After 9/11, we spend trillions overhauling transportation security. After Charlie Kirk, we need to overhaul our mental health security.
Bring back lunatic asylums.
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"There needs to be a clear policy, nationwide, to deal with our crazy people problem."
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Until this country can prove that it's above electing and appointing lunatics[1] that would have the power to set that policy, this needs to be something that's handled on a State-by-State basis (as the Constitution would have us do) where different States can experiment with different approaches that suit their particular contexts. How to deal with the mentally ill will (and should) be different in Wyoming versus Massachusetts versus Florida.
As Lizzie points out below, we have more of a funding issue - this stuff isn't cheap - more than we have a lack of available policies. Until people are willing to see their taxes go up to treat this problem humanely, nothing good is going to happen on this front. And empowering the State to enforce psychological medication adherence will make the fight over the COVID vaccine mandates look like a nice game of Pat-a-cake.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/the-madness-of-robert-f-kennedy-jr/
Lunatic asylums were closed not because of legal considerations, but because of cost. Once it was clear that there was no cure and that people would have to be institutionalized for life, cities, states and people in general gave up, for the relief to the public budget. The same was true a few years later about jails. SCOTUS said that jails had to provide minimal humanitarian conditions and overcrowding was not acceptable. Without spending more money for more jails, and without employing the Roman remedy of decimation in the high security prisons to make more room for the folks graduated from medium security, etc., the only option was to let people out early or not sentence them in the first place. The Progressive push for social justice was NEVER about love, caring, or forgiveness outside of the public propaganda which was designed to let the public accept the renunciation of the government duty to maintain order.