A woman pays tribute to the victims of the May 26 shooting at the Rob Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Photo:
Kin Man Hui / Associated Press
The recent mass shootings in Uwalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, have sparked urgent calls to change the culture. That is harder to do than to change the policy, which is difficult enough. Changing policy requires addressing specifics as well as probabilities. The policy works within the constitutional parameters to reduce the risk of damage, and not to completely eliminate the damage.
Debates about mass shootings have a reputation for growing into partisans. Democrats, favoring gun control, accuse Republicans of opportunistically asking mental health issues as a diversion tactic. This is partly true: Republicans are neglecting mental health reform at the usual times. But there are achievable policy measures that could be taken to reduce the risk of violence related to mental illness.
In fact, mental health reform is one of the great bipartisan success stories of our time. The mass shooting in Newtown in 2012 motivated Congress to investigate the failures of American mental health care. The end result of this investigation became a law in the 21st Century Drug Act, passed by a large majority in Congress and signed by President Obama in December 2016. It created a new Assistant Secretary position to oversee the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Authority. , a federal agency for a long time. strayed. The new law also allowed for the expansion of assisted outpatient treatment at the state level, one of the most trusted community programs to stabilize people with serious mental illness.
Sensor Bill Cassidy (R., La) and Chris Murphy (D., Connecticut) are currently trying to revive that spirit of bipartisanship with their re-approval of the 2016 law. But their current law could be strengthened by taking over two major reforms that were considered after Newtown but did not eventually become law: repealing the so-called IMD exclusion, which limits Medicaid’s ability to fund inpatient psychiatric care, and giving families of mentally ill adults more access to health information of their loved ones, by weakening the limitations of the Law on Portability and Liability of Health Insurance. Dealing with these parts of the unfinished business would help increase the treatment rate of the seriously ill, which is - or should be - the goal of mental health policy.
Mentally ill people are less violent in treatment than untreated ones. Increasing the treatment rate would reduce general violence related to mental illness. Most of the violence committed by mentally ill people is more everyday than spectacular mass shootings. Preventing such a massacre would require more precise intervention - targeting a particular form of violence perpetrated by a particular class of mentally ill people - than mental health policy can provide.
The same uncertainty prevails with the leading weapons control proposals. It is easier to focus on obstacles to desired change - such as political obstruction and alleged misinterpretation of the Constitution by judges - than on what those changes would achieve if barriers did not exist.
One way to work on changing culture is to force a debate on politics. The policy changes we are ready to bring reflect who we are as a culture. Serious culture requires more than political debate than signaling virtues, even if it means accepting changes that promise only marginal benefits.
G. Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Copyright © 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
It appeared in the print edition of May 27, 2022.