How About a Debate Over Common-Sense Mental-Health Laws?

At WSJ, "A Shooting in Oregon":

As we went to press Friday, federal, state and local authorities in Oregon were trying to piece together the inevitable puzzle of motive that led to the slaughter of at least nine students at a community college in the small town of Roseburg.

Sheriff John Hanlin of Douglas County, like law officers elsewhere recently, has ordered his staff not to use the name of the alleged killer, lest it merely glorify what he did. This is an understandable, if ultimately quixotic, gesture in the modern media age. The whole world soon will be saturated with the name of Chris Harper-Mercer and every possible detail—some of it true, some of it barely verified—of his life and the tragedy at Umpqua Community College.

One certainty in the wake of the massacre is that gun control will be discussed avidly for the next few weeks, as after past incidents. This debate emerged after a crazed gunman killed 12 individuals at the Navy Yard in Washington in 2013. And after a classroom in Newtown, the movie theater in Aurora and after Virginia Tech.

President Obama called for gun legislation: “This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America.” But Americans did not choose to set a madman loose with a gun. Mr. Obama also called for “common-sense gun-safety laws.” The American people, we suspect, would like more evidence of which “common-sense” policies will work and which won’t before they consent to abrogating the Second Amendment.

Our own view remains that what deserves equal if not greater political attention are common-sense mental-health laws. It is now established that Harper-Mercer attended the Switzer Learner Center, in Torrance, Calif., which treats teenagers with emotional disabilities and mental-health problems. He ended up in Roseburg.

The element of untreated mental or emotional disturbance is present in most of the individuals who commit horrific mass killings in the U.S. If it is preordained that talking heads must argue for days now about guns in America, at least let some specialists enter the debate to discuss how identifying and treating disturbed brains might contribute to forestalling the madness of murdering innocent strangers...

More.

Leftists don't want a debate on mental health. They want to abolish the Second Amendment.