Quote:The common theme is that they were all deeply disturbed young men whose acts of murder had a sickening aspect of utter senselessness. The Daily News got it backwards. Its headline about the Navy Yard should have read, “Different gun, same slay.”

Maybe, just maybe, this time we can have a real debate about mental illness. To this point, we’ve had a simplistically instrumental focus. It’s like seeing a mad man wearing a tinfoil hat to protect himself from radio waves and thinking, “That’s a shame, if only we could ban tinfoil.”

When Aaron Alexis called the Rhode Island police a month ago to tell them that enemies were harassing him with a microwave machine, it was clear that he was suffering paranoid delusions and needed help. But the authorities let him go his merry way, evidently to sink deeper into the madness he mistook for reality.

If we had the same callous disregard masquerading as compassionate nonjudgmentalism for people suffering from Alzheimer’s, they would be sleeping in our streets, eating from our trash cans and rotting in our jails. It needs to be easier to compel treatment for the mentally ill. That may or may not reduce random shootings, but it would reduce the total amount of suffering from an illness that wellness-obsessed America is happy to ignore.

There will be another Aaron Alexis. If we can’t predict what gun he’ll use, we already know his mental state.