The police could bring them in, but they were held in the security unit until seen by the MD, then if they needed to stay they were placed on the hold. If they didn’t it, they were left with the police to disposition.

AS for Cho, giving the reason that he was “bullied” in high school and finally took action 4 years later just doesn’t hold water. If it was back in high school why not do the shooting there? No that is just an excuse for the fact that he had a mental problem it was looked in to but there was no follow-up. If one of the teacher had to one-on-one with him because he upset the class, this was not a small problem.

Whose to blame; his parents, the teacher, the campus mental health system? No!! Cho is to blame, he had an opportunity to get help, it was available, he chose not to take it.

Will it happen again? Yes. Sometime, somewhere, somehow a crazy person will show up with a gun and start firing.

He wasn’t nuts in the traditional sense. I never got any sort of sense that he had an underlying thought disorder. Far from being disorganized, his actions showed forthought; he was goal-directed and logical. He may have been anhedonic, or simply a hate-filled antisocial… but neither of those usually justify incarceration or institutionalization.

“Gun Free Zones” are stupid and I hope Texas follows Tennessee’s lead in reversing that here. What would you rather have in class, 20 complete strangers who have been authorized to carry concealed weapons or one Cho?

I’m assuming you mean the question about whether or not the country should change to universal health care.

Because that brings up an interesting question: Besides the whole medical/physical scene universal health plans would deal with, I wonder what universal health would mean to the mental health care in this country?

As it stands right now in Texas, it’s near impossible to get somebody into MHMR mental health hospitals. You have to be actively suicidal or crazy-type homicidal. All of the MHMR campuses have down-sized to the about 1/4 of the size they were a few years ago.

So if there were universal health, would the whole system have to be beefed up again? With outpatient clinics to boot? And would that mean that just anybody could walk into an ER and c/o mental health issues and be put into the system?

It adds a whole new dimension to the universal health issue that I admit that I hadn’t even thought of before.

Every drunk or minor trouble-maker in town ends up on a 5150. They scoop ‘em up and bring ‘em in, then cite/release them. I call psych, they release the 5150 hold. Guess who’s stuck with the disposition? You guess it. Around here, the 5150 is just a way to legally round up unsavory folks and dump them on us.

The same people who are calling the police for drunks in the park are the same ones who are upset that the ER is full of drunks and they have to wait 5 hours to be seen.

If I have a point, it’s probably that 5150 doesn’t really solve anything. Most of the people they use it for would have been better off sleeping it off in the park.

We will not see people put in mental institutions just because their thinking is not right. First of all, this is a judgment call that is harder to make than it seems, plus the fact that the cost is not something that the country wants to bear. There is probably more risk from all the criminals being released because prisons are overcrowded — another example of the lack of will to spend the money.

It’s easy to look in the retrospectoscope from a tragedy like VT and say, “something should have been done.” The rarity of this event says more than anything about the difficulty if not impossibility of successfully preventing this regardless of how much we spend, in the mean time turning our society into one in which we look for signs of mental illness in everyone we meet, ironically creating a societal paranoia.