Quite seriously, psychotics with violent urges (a small minority, fortunately) should be detected and monitored. Despite what that idiot-stick on CNN thinks, guns are not the cause of violence, while madness combined with malevolence often is.

It also wouldn’t hurt if there were restrictions on the type of media that is liable to give psychotics destructive ideas. We not only have too much sex in entertainment these days, but too much explicit violence.

Before anyone jumps to the First Amendment argument, let’s remember that the Founders weren’t attempting to protect porn, either of the sexual or blood-spatter type.

SDN may choose whether to have the left attempt to suppress the Second Amendment or to recognize that these slaughters, which are no new thing, are to be blamed on those who perform them. As far as I can recollect, almost every perpetrator, from Richard Speck to Nidal Hasan to James Holmes has been severely mentally ill or driven by fanaticism.

The fanatics can be suppressed by use of present law if we choose to apply it, and rarely do many months go by without the FBI or some other law agency entrapping individual terrorists, or a group of them. When it comes to psychotics, though, an exaggerated concern for their rights makes them difficult to deal with until a severe crime has been committed.

I have direct experience with this, while I suspect SDN has none. Even forcing institutionalized psychotics to accept medication is fraught with concern for their “rights,” and preventing their watching violent television, for instance, is not to be thought of.

Let me be clear — the vast majority of mentally ill are not inclined to violence. It is those few whose personalities are naturally violent — the “mean” ones, in other words — whom we need to monitor and control. These are the few who combine savage natures with irrationality to commit massacres, and these are the ones most likely to be ignited by graphic portrayals of violence in the media.

A little censorship would be a good thing. Certainly I have far less concern for the rights of the entertainment industry than I do for the rights of the populace to avoid violence. And I repeat, the Founders didn’t intend the First Amendment to protect pornography of any sort. By the intelligent application of original Constitutional standards Oliver Stone might be limited in what he can distort, but Rush Limbaugh would be safe.

No right is absolute. The Second Amendment has been maintained because the Right defends it against the Left. In the case of the First Amendment, however, it has been distorted beyond Constitutional recognition by the combined efforts of the Left and the exaggerated concerns of some on the Right.

Who gets to decide any similar matter? Citizens — that is, you and I — decide similar questions all the time, whether on juries, boards or councils.

As for reasons, the prevention of unreasoning violence is a worthy goal. The alternative, of course, is to wait until a massacre occurs, then learn, “…his mother, Arlene Holmes, told reporters she was unaware of the attacks until she woke up, but added: ‘You’ve got the right person.’”

The realistic problem nowadays isn’t that sane people will be locked up but that those who are both psychotic and violent are running around below society’s radar. This Holmes is a good example. 

We can respond as Piers Morgan suggests, banning guns as the instrument of slaughter, or we can do something about those individuals who commit the crimes. It should be obvious to anyone which is preferable, and I believe it should also be obvious that it is better to act before than after a horrifying incident.

Could Holmes have been detected ahead of time? I can’t be sure, but it seems (assuming early reports are accurate, always somewhat questionable) that his parents weren’t completely surprised.