Come on Mike. You can read more carefully than that. First, as you probably know, Krauthammer is a psychiatrist - the real MD kind. Second, he said specifically that the decision to make it difficult to involuntarily institutionalize the mentally different was a humane decision. Then he pointed out that you take the crunchy with the smooth and very occassionally there is a downside to having people who are crazy , angry and dangerous walking around unsupervised. His point was simply that if we want to look at social policy this was more about not having a methodology for distinguishing between the harmlessly mentally ill and the paranoid schizophrenics who are a danger to themselves and others. ( by the way, it is very unlikely your grandmother was instutionalized against the will of her family - I doubt that was right wing conspiracy as you seem to imply. ) Krauthammer did not even say that Cho should have been locked up for being weird.

Krauthammer is definitely not the stereotype you seem to seem him as. I think if you actually read him and listened to him you'd find that whether or not you agree with everything he says, his mind is formidable, his erudition impressive and his reasoning pretty sound. He is definitely not an ideologue or a polemicist. I really worry about you if you are impressed with a clown like Michael Moore and yet find Krauthammer too partisan.

Give him a chance. He really isn't selling anything. In the world of talking heads it is sometimes easy to forget that there really is such a thing as an intellectual who is not sucking up for tenure at Columbia.

If you want to see a politician compressing a complex issue into a sound bite for personal gain, read Obama's speech that day.

>>>I was not suggesting it be compulsory that the unqualified be armed. <g>
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>>>Krauthammer very much worth reading today. He has a way of cutting through the posturing and the drama and actually thinking clearly. In part :
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>>>"It did not take long for the perennial debate about gun control to break out, preceded by the inevitable scolding and clucking abroad about America's lax gun laws.
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>>>It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly. Nonetheless, we should have no illusions about what laws can do. There are other ways to kill in large numbers, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated. Determined killers will obtain guns no matter how strict the laws. And stricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.
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>>>If we are going to look for a political issue here, the more relevant is not gun control but psychosis control. We decided a half a century ago that our more eccentric and, indeed, crazy fellow citizens would not be easily locked in asylums. It was a humane decision, but with the inevitable consequence that some who really need quarantine are allowed to roam the streets." Charles Krauthammer - April 20, 2007
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>>Krauthammer is a giant among midgets. As you so eloguently pointed out, he has an uncanny ability to "cut to the chase."
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>What he actually has is an uncanny ability to appeal to conservatives. In this instance he is compressing a complex issue down to a sound bite. As it happens, one of my great-grandmothers was committed to a mental hospital where she lived out her last 10 years or so. Reason? She forgot people's names and went walking sometimes until she got lost outside of town. This is now recognized as Alzheimer's, which wasn't even on the radar at the time. Back then they decided she was nuts and locked her up. It concerns me that Charles Krauthammer -- who I admit I didn't like to begin with -- is suggesting we should return to such policies.