The Nashville district attorney called on Wednesday for the Tennessee legislature to make it easier to commit someone to a mental institution after a man who was previously released for incompetence to stand trial was accused of shooting an 18-year-old college student in the head.
Belmont University student Jillian Ludwig, of New Jersey, was walking on a track in a local park when she was shot and critically wounded at about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to the Metro Nashville Police. They arrested Shaquille Taylor, 29, after surveillance video and witness statements pointed to him as the shooter.
“Taylor was shooting at a car when a bullet hit Ludwig in the head as she walked on a track in a park across the street,” police said on social media when announcing the arrest Wednesday.
I appreciate the detail, and I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. I simply have a problem with people who look at a situation like this and their immediate reaction is “that person should be locked up.” (not saying you said that, mind you)
To those people, I say: We tried involuntary institutionalization for a long, long time, and it was an unmitigated disaster where people with legitimate mental illnesses were driven more into psychosis as a result of subhuman treatment and relentless stigma. We know a lot more about mental illness than we did just a few short decades ago, and the longer we ignore that those maladies are just as much “illnesses” as things like the flu, the more we invite violence like this. Mental illness is a problem none of us give a single shit about until an untreated, hopelessly abandoned person with a crippling mental illness does something that directly impacts one of the rest of us. Then suddenly it’s knives out. None of us want to pay enough to fix the system, we just want to bitch and complain inside our safe little bubbles where we can rely on a retributive justice system to repeatedly dole out harsh punishment that gives us an illusory sense of security so we can go back to our normal lives. Folks fire off “thoughts and prayers”, we put the person in jail (or to death), wash, rinse, repeat.
Sorry for the rant. Coming from someone who lost a bipolar family member to suicide, people like this piss me the fuck off, and I just had to put it out there.