>Now, most of the mentally ill are out on the streets or in prison. The laws have been changed to state that the mentally ill cannot be hospitalized until they’ve already attacked someone.<
Just walk down a crowded street in one of the larger cities and you will see people who obviously need help, but who refuse to seek that help. In many, many homes there are older children, many of them adults, whose parents would give anything to get them the help they so desperately need.
Our system is so broken. There are those who would take the rights of the vast majority to self-defense, in order to ignore the fact that depriving desperate families the power to get help for their deeply disturbed sons (and some daughters), dooms us to see this nightmare repeat again and again.
Just down the road from Sandy Hook is a closed State institution where they did have crazy people incarcerated back till the late seventies. Beautiful buildings and campus all empty now.