(Photo of Doc Boucher, my orthodontist, and the suburban Detroit house where he shot his ex-wife and son to death. Photo AP Wire Service 1968.)

Well, we just about have this weird year in the bag now.  Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf left us yesterday, one of the many memorable characters who impacted my life in the course of living theirs, and I am sad to see him go. I have his signature around here someplace. I will have to try to find it.

Three and a wake-up and we will start a brave New Year filled with promise. I have several resolutions all ready to start ignoring immediately.

Some I won’t. For example, I found a cool aquatic center down in Culpeper, which should enable me to paddle my way to Memorial Day, when the Big Pink pool opens and we can take the show outside again. One thing I would like to do is stop yammering at you about the impossible things we are supposed to believe. I won’t bore you with the Cliff thing- the House is being dragged back here for some theatricals on Sunday, and we may or may not know something relevant before the disco ball comes down at Times Square.

Nor will I talk about gun control, though all sorts of people are interested in the proposed legislation that Senator Feinstein is talking about introducing. It has a bunch of really amazing provisions, and as I said, people are talking about it with some animation.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been quite vocal about his determination to impose more restrictive gun legislation. I am OK with that discussion- but I should note that he has armed guards for his kids on the way to and from school, and the private school they attend has armed guards. Senator Feinstein has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Broadcaster David Gregory is in hot water for waving around a thirty-round clip on a DC Sunday talk show. That is illegal in the District, and the cops told him so, but he apparently answers to a higher authority than the rest of us.

Oh, his kids attend Sidwell Friends School with President Obama’s daughters.

I don’t have to tell you that Sidwell has armed guards, do I?

(The campus of the elite Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Photo Sidwell Friends.)

I will wait with interest as the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body discusses rules for the rest of us that and see what they come up with. Whatever it is, I suspect it will have trouble in the House. Vice President Biden will lead the charge on this at the President’s direction, so literally anything is possible.

The ultimate problem with this is that everything associated with this continuing horror is already illegal. Thus, additional legislation ought to be devoted to identifying the people who are likely to do these awful things. The default value is that they are crazy, and the approach to keeping crazy people away from guns is one of the first things we ought to be talking about in this national dialogue.

The culprit may be a change in mental health treatment. Back in the day, many of these seriously ill people would have been confined and cared for in a state institution. Starting in 1955, we were told to treat the mentally ill by getting them out of the institution, treating them with the then-new wonder drug Thorazine. The philosophy was that the patients should be treated with dignity, and be permitted their privacy.

You know what happens when we believe impossible things. Funding for the institutions was slashed as soon as the population thinned out. Many wound up on the streets, or in and out of prison. Here in Virginia, for example, we are 85% below the in-patient numbers of the 1950s- and it is pretty clear that there are more, not less, people who really need significant help.

And ought to be kept away from the means of harming themselves, or others.

Stop me if you have heard this one- my orthodontist when I was a young teen was a guy named Doctor Daniel Boucher (inset above). He was good at what he did. He removed four of my teeth and imprisoned my remaining ones in a stainless steel cage for a couple years. When I got hit in the face it gouged the soft tissues of the inside of my mouth- unpleasant, but I think everyone was satisfied with the ultimate result.

Timing is everything. I had finished the course of treatment and was at the point of ignoring my retainer. It was a good thing.

See, Doc Boucher was a big outdoorsman. He used to appear on Mort Neff’s wheezer of a show “Michigan Outdoors.” Doc would talk about guns and field use, and then one fine day, he shot his ex-wife and son to death.

He was pretty well off, and I assume his attorney was fighting for any angle he could find in an open-and-shut case. It was cold-blooded murder. No one ever made a case for what sparked it- it was not infidelity, since the Bouchers had divorced, and murder is as massive a case of abuse as it is possible to have. Doc’s defense was logical. He was nuts.

He won. Doc was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence at the Michigan Home for the Criminally Insane.

That is better time than a stint on lifer row at Jackson State Prison. But he  hit the jackpot. A Supreme Court ruling held that such ill-defined sentences were unconstitutional. The upshot, as you might imagine, was an orderly review of each case to ensure that “patients” were individually reviewed to protect society from mentally ill people with demonstrated violent records, and re-try them in criminal court as necessary.

Oh, horseshit. It did not happen that way. Some Constitutional thing about double jeopardy, apparently. Doc walked. His release was unconditional, and the emptying out of the Home was almost total.

I don’t think Doc was really insane- I think he had a smart lawyer.

I never heard of him committing another crime, but I don’t know what happened to him. Other residents of the Home were there because they didn’t have good lawyers, or were whack-jobs who on release migrated to the streets and shelters.

And the jails, of course. The “balloon theory” holds that if you press on one side of a balloon, it bulges out on another in a zero-sum universe. Jail is the other side of the mental institution balloon. It is ironic, since the Homes had been established to give dignity to the sick who were not criminal by intent.

But with the end of large-scale state mental institutions, the circle came full turn. Real and imaginary crimes were the justification for Law Enforcement to get them off the street for the protection of society or the individual.

Anyway, de-institutionalization was a freaking mistake. Our young shooter in Newtown was apparently being confronted with the possibility of being put away, but it is a tough process, and there are few beds available. His response to the threat posed by his mother was murder, and then mass murder and suicide. The little cretin should have been put away long before he got a chance to steal legal weapons.

And someone at the school should have been able to respond, just as they are capable of doing at The University of Chicago Lab School, where the Mayor’s kids go, or at Sidwell Friends.

Let’s talk about the real problem here, can we?

(University of Chicago Lab Schools. Photo UCLS).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com