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We need to cut the red tape and bleeding heart regulations, and make it a LOT cheaper to keep people locked up, whether they belong in a secure mental institution or a regular prison. Frankly, there’s no reason for people who’ve been committed to a mental institution with no real possibility of recovery sufficient to re-join society, to be receiving all sorts of expensive “treatment”. There’s no reason it should cost more than $20,000 a year to keep somebody in a secure institution, and medicated to whatever extent is necessary to make them easily manageable by staff.

We don't really have mental institutions in the US anymore. They were all closed in the 60s when the Federal Government refused to all Medicaid dollars to fund them. The states couldn't afford them -- so they closed them.

All we have are hospital beds, which cost up to $300,000 per year. Most of the US mentally ill are warehoused in jails, which costs about $100,000 per year. Those who have committed no crime yet make up about 30 percent of the homeless living on the street.

The states can't afford to pick up any of these costs without a drastic increase in taxes.

As a society that believes in a god-given right to carry guns, I think we must accept the fact that there are people around us who can point and shoot anytime they want to -- at the office, at school, in church, on the street and highways, at home, in shopping malls, in movie theaters, at sports events.

This is the cost of freedom (in lieu of paying exorbitant taxes). We want small government -- which means we have to take on the responsibility of protecting ourselves every minute of the day. I don't have a problem with this. I carry everywhere I go.

The mental institutions were closed, but they were largely replaced by group homes scattered around the general community, with insufficient supervision to protect either the residents (who are often victims of their government-paid caretakers in these homes) or the neighbors. These group homes may be cheaper to run than the mental hospitals were, but I believe serviceable mental hospitals could be run for what we’re currently paying for the group homes (most of which have had to fight local legal battles with people who don’t want the facility in their neighborhood, in order to get set up in the first place). The money is often coming from different line times in the federal and state budgets, but it’s still a lot of money. What used to fall in the “mental hospital” line item of government budgets is now found in additional expenditures via Section 8 housing subsidies, food stamps, Medicaid, “outreach programs”, and on and on.