RUTHFULLY YOURS

All these events have two things in common: guns and mental illness. From that fact flows the demand, every time, that we “do something.” Saying it, however, is not the same as doing something that would in fact mitigate this recurrent carnage. Doing something in our system inevitably means putting in motion an array of actors toward this goal—elected or appointed public officials, the police, the medical community and not least parents.

Guns first. When a Parkland happens, the liberal half of America’s politics puts forth the same two-word solution: gun control. There is a simple causality to this argument—fewer guns, fewer murders. Always left out is evidence it would work.

Gun-control laws—for example, to regulate bump stocks, AR-15s or ammunition magazines—foundered because advocates have never offered credible evidence they would deter mass shootings. Because gun proponents believe, not without reason, that the left’s ultimate goal is confiscation, the political prospects for a gun control solution have been and will remain about zero.

On Thursday the gun-control side pointed to President Trump’s signing of a bill last year revoking an Obama rule requiring the Social Security Administration to forward to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System the names of disability recipients who need a third party to help them manage their benefits because of a mental impairment. But this overly broad Obama rule was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and National Rifle Association.

That dispute nonetheless points to another part of the do-something demand: the violently mentally ill. Let us stipulate that a necessary line should separate the large population of people getting treatment for emotional or mental illnesses and those whose mental disturbance has brought them to the brink of doing significant physical violence.

Unlike gun control, medicine has ample evidence that appropriate medication or treatment can stabilize the violently mentally ill. The National Institute of Mental Health collects data on evidence-based approaches involving drugs, intense psychiatric treatment and intervention.

The argument here involves questions over what levels of therapeutic coercion should be permitted. For example, should courts be able to require the severely mentally ill to take treatment to avoid commitment to a hospital? With appropriate legal protections, we think the answer is yes. Advocates for this idea often include the patients’ distraught families.

For years, though, some mental-health activists and lawyers, with allies inside the federal bureaucracies, have fought the idea of involuntary institutionalization for violent patients who refuse treatment. Their approach clearly isn’t working. Treatment requirements, by the way, don’t need a federal law. States can enact civil-commitment laws if they wish.

There is also an interim solution against murderous assailants: shoot back. There is evidence it works.

Last November in Texas, a rifle instructor, with an AR-15, shot a suspect about to open fire on a church full of people. The shooter dropped his weapon and fled. In 2015 a security officer shot and killed two gunmen about to carry out an ISIS-inspired attack in Garland, Texas. The armed security guard at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland didn’t get a chance to engage Nikolas Cruz, but fewer might have died if he had. Institutions such as schools probably must train and arm someone to provide self-defense in a world with so many threats.

There is one other possibility, suggested by President Trump in his Parkland statement Thursday: “Create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life.” The thought sounds self-evident. But on the available evidence, the idea of dignity in life looks more than ever to be in need of restoration.