Tucson: It's the Mental Health You Paranoid Schizophrenic Loon and another thing

There are two things that I hope that we take away from the events of this past weekend in Tucson where 6 people were dead among the 14 injured at the hands of a lone gunman.  The first, is that mental health services in this country are woefully inadequate.  From press accounts, the shooter was expelled from his community college because his behavior had grown increasingly bizarre and erratic.  Pima Community College required that he get a mental health evaluation if he wished to return to college.  He bought a gun instead.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that the college acted appropriately.  I suppose he is right, although that statement says a great deal about society's low standards for right behavior.  In a world that relies more heavily on self-policing where drug companies are trusted to test their own products and financial markets are supposed to regulate themselves through derivatives, it only makes sense that the mentally ill are supposed to seek out an evaluation on their own.  

Assuming the shooter had enough mental clarity to understand that he had a problem, he would then have to find a mental health facility and check himself in for treatment.  In Pima county, this would be next to impossible as the county moved 45% of its mental health recipients of  government roles in 2010 (Huffington Post).  Without private insurance, mental health coverage would have been nearly impossible for the shooter.   At 22 years of age, unemployed and expelled from college, it is unlikely that the shooter had insurance.  Until a recently enacted part of the healthcare bill took effect (aka Obamacare, aka Job-Killing Healthcare bill, etc.), the shooter would have been dropped from his parents coverage.  

So here we stand, looking back at innocent lives lost and wondering what it all means.  Many have called for toning down political rhetoric or tightening gun laws to solve the problem.  These are both things that I hope will happen someday.  Would it have changed anything here?  Not likely.  The shooter was said by friends to not be overly political.  There are already enough guns in the system that the shooter would have little trouble acquiring one if he wanted it bad enough.  (It should also be noted that a man interviewed at the scene was legally carrying a handgun and failed to stop the crime -- crossfire anyone?)  It seems like the one thing that might have changed things would have been the intervention of mental health professionals.  The problem was identified and the solution was left up to the person least capable of solving it -- the mentally ill person.  Until we want to face this reality, we should get used to this kind of event playing out every few years.  (And with population growth, probably more frequently than that -- although as most of the growth will be nonwhite, we can write-off a significant number as crime or terrorism depending on the race of the shooter.)

The second lesson that I hope that we learn from this is a little more esoteric.  Determine the problem before drawing conclusions.  From the shootings on Saturday, it was Wednesday before I heard anyone mention mental health services as a potential solution.  I have heard much drum beating about political rhetoric and gun control, but nothing on mental health which seemed so obvious.  I will stipulate to the fact that Sarah Palin, Glen Beck et al need to shut the hell up, but that was not a huge factor here.

My statistics teacher hammered this point every day.  (1) State the hypothesis.  (2) State an alternate hypothesis.  (3) Test the hypothesis.  (4) Draw conclusions.  As we normally do, we skipped steps 1 through 3.  A tragic mistake.