Robert Card, a 40-year-old Army reservist who is wanted for the murders in Lewiston (Maine) of 18 people, spent two weeks last summer in a mental hospital. He reported hearing voices and threatened to blow up an Army base near Saco, Maine.

Robert Card was permitted to walk without restriction despite the red lights that flashed continuously. No one took his gun from him, which would have been a Second Amendment violation. No one suggested he should be readmitted to an inpatient mental facility where he spent two weeks in the summer of last year.

Robert Card, armed with a rifle, walked into two bars and a bowling alley and shot 22 people.

Robert Card shouldn’t have been able to breathe air as a man. Card is mentally ill. Although he can function in society and interact with others, he poses a danger to society because of the chaos and conflict in his mind.

I am certain that the psychiatrists who certified his safety and that of others when he left the mental institution signed off on it. How could they have been so tragically mistaken? It is true that the brain is still the last frontier in medical science. As we learn more about the brain, the psychiatrists who approved Card’s mental state were making educated guesses. No one could have predicted Card’s mental state in the future.

Mentally ill individuals are attacking and accosting residents in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. When is the cost to victims too high? How many families will be ripped apart by people who are mentally ill but didn’t take medication or convince doctors that they were not a danger to anyone?

The obvious solution of locking up the mentally ill to protect society from their predatory behavior is not liked by anyone. The courts, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that people with mental illness should be allowed to roam the streets unless they can prove they are a danger to us.

We’re tearing down mental facilities, including long-term care and hospitals, at an unprecedented pace. Maine is a state that offers a wide range of mental health services.

New York Post:

Maine is not the only state that is struggling with mental health services. All across the nation, mental hospitals are closing.

By the end of 2021, there will only be 87 mental health crisis workers for the whole state, as opposed to more than 2,500 officers of law enforcement.

There were more than 2,000 people waiting to receive outpatient mental healthcare treatment. 32 of the 45 beds in the emergency department were occupied by patients awaiting release from residential mental care.

In Maine, 20 residential mental health programs had closed due to a lack of staff and insufficient funding.

The solution to the problem of mentally ill people killing our loved ones is deemed cruel. Many people think it is unnecessary to lock someone up against their wishes because they might become violent.

We’ve come far from the days when we confined mentally ill people in institutions reminiscent of Bedlam. If we are serious about the mental crisis in America we will have to take a lot of people off the street and into long-term facilities for mental health.