I would say based on what Ive read that this is probably another example of the broken mental health system. A local woman here just won a $300,000 settlement after being attacked and hurt in front of her 6 y/o. The assailant in this case had a long history, including self-medication with meth. Even his own father had warned the authorities. (Sound familiar? Families of mental patients are at a disadvantage. They can’t do much.) In Seattle over the past 10 or 15 years, they’ve had scenarios like this with every conceivable kind of weapon. Sometimes the body count is fairly high, as in the Cafe Racer case, other times victims are merely injured. A woman was stabbed to death on New Year’s Eve 2007 a block from my apt. in Seattle. He openly admitted that it was random, that she was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” It could have been any unarmed person in that neighborhood and everybody knows it. I know that a certain number of bad things will happen and can’t be prevented, but I really think that there are improvements that need to be made in mental health laws. I know that civil libertarians are afraid of abuses in involuntary commitment and I know that’s a serious concern but there has to be a better way than what were doing now. The book that opened my eyes on the history of this is called Madness in the Streets. I forget the author.
I can think of one improvement that can be made instantly and cost-free: Stop saying meth-heads are "self-medicating." They just want to get effed up, and calling it "self-medicating" is sugar coating it.