In America, whether it comes to tackling crime, or the most severe mental illness, there’s a popular sentiment that says the best solution is to “lock ’em up and throw away the keys.” That’s part of the reason this country has a higher incarceration rate than any other. A knee-jerk response to the Newtown massacre is likely to be a push to reduce legal obstacles to involuntary treatment.

Christian Science Monitor reports: Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza may have been motivated by anger at his mother because of plans to have him committed for treatment, Fox News reported Thursday, citing comments from the son of an area church pastor and an unnamed neighborhood source. Fox also cited an unnamed senior law enforcement official saying anger at plans for “his future mental-health treatment” were being investigated as a possible motive.

While the Fox reports are still uncorroborated, other media reports paint a general picture that suggests Ms. Lanza was growing increasingly concerned about the mental health of her son.

These reports are bringing to light a debate over where to set the bar when it comes to forcing an individual into treatment – and whether those caring for people with mental-health issues have enough resources available to head off potential crises before they happen.

On one hand, warning signs are often apparent, so making it easier to commit someone for involuntary treatment could save lives.

The young adult men who end up being violent often “have others in their lives … who are trying desperately to get help before something bad happens. They can see it coming down the pike,” says Liza Gold, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. But caregivers “have run up against these commitment laws that are so restrictive – that come down so far on the side of civil liberties and privacy – that it is almost impossible to contain, hospitalize, treat someone with a chronic and escalating mental illness.”

On the other hand, forced treatment can also be emotionally wrenching for the patient and cause lingering anger, mental-health experts say.

“People who are forcibly treated so often feel traumatized by it,” says Robert Whitaker, author of “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” “Women in particular will sometimes talk about it almost like a quasi-rape, because sometimes they are held down and injected,” he says.

“That’s Crazy,” is a documentary that shows forced treatment from the perspective of someone who has been stripped of the right to make choices concerning his own health:

That’s Crazy Trailer from Ian Mangiardi on Vimeo.

Max Blumenthal writes: Many of those I interviewed at the gun shows were common hunters, sportsmen, and expert target shooters. One man told me he hunted deer with a bow and throwing knives, a family tradition he learned from his grandfather. For them, guns were a part of daily life, enabling their interaction with the rugged western environment in which they were raised.

But then there were others seeking out military-grade sniper rifles designed specifically to kill humans with deadly accuracy from hundreds of meters away. Though the exemption covers all “private sales”, not limited to gun shows, the so-called “gun show loophole” means that two in every five guns are acquired without a federally-mandated criminal background check.

Inside the Reno casino, I sidled up to a group of gray-haired men gathered around an exhibition table where a dealer from Nemesis Arms was touting the features of the Mini Windrunner .308 caliber sniper rifle. (Adam Lanza’s weapon of choice was a .223 caliber Bushmaster assault rifle.) According to Defense Review, a leading online newsletter covering the small arms industry, the gun was a “nasty little piece of manpackable/backpackable ballistic business!” With the sleek, 3ft-long rifle in his hand, the dealer explained:

“The bipod will articulate to the side. You can shoot off of walls, car or truck doors, building tops, cliffs – at any angle, all the way to barricade position.”

In less than a minute, the dealer effortlessly disassembled the gun and packed it away discreetly in a black backpack, explaining:

“The reason that we don’t do this in a molly pack is that it looks military. If it’s military, then people will assume that you’re military. So what we do with this is we keep it as benign as possible so it looks like just any other backpack that anybody would have … so anybody with any garb, any dress, can go anywhere with it.”

Why would a common civilian need a sniper rifle capable of shooting off of building tops and car doors? And why would they require stealthy methods of concealment, so they could pass through American cities without detection? Companies like Nemesis Arms never explained the logic behind such disturbing sales pitches. But clearly, they were falling on fertile soil.

Adam Lanza couldn’t have killed twenty children without access to lethal weapons. But the rage that led to a massacre might never have been triggered without access to lethal drugs. As the British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy has said: “psychotropic drugs of pretty well any group can trigger violence up to and including homicide.”

Alongside the emerging debate on gun control in America, another conversation on mental health is also unfolding. Unfortunately, much of the latter conversation is poorly informed and based on false assumptions, namely that the primary weakness in the mental health system is lack of universal access, and that when mental health care is available, it is effective.

There is a popular view that the crucial factor in averting mental health crises that end with catastrophic consequences, is that the patient must stay on his medication. Drugs make dangerous people safe and so long as they keep taking them, the rest of us having nothing to worry about — that’s the idea.

Since 1997, when the FDA opened the floodgates, Americans have been exposed to a massive amount of direct-to-consumer advertising from the pharmaceutical industry — a form of advertising that is illegal throughout the world except for in only one other country, New Zealand. One of the principal results has been to make psychotropic drugs into the most profitable sector of the drug market. As a trade magazine trumpets, “Psychiatric drugs: a booming business.”

Not only has advertising helped boost sales of these drugs, but more broadly it has served to indoctrinate the population at large into believing that whatever problems an individual might be experiencing, a remedy can be found in the shape of a pill. The marketing directive — ask your doctor if Seroquel/Lunesta/Zyprexa/etc is right for you — has become a such-repeated formula that it has won well-deserved parodies. Nevertheless, this kind of advertising works and has been highly effective in conditioning us to believe that mental health is now all simply about tuning brain chemistry with psychotropic drugs.

Whereas it was once more commonly understood that the healthy formation of a person involved parenting, education, acquisition of social skills, nurturing social relationships, and the development of self-knowledge — a life-long process — nowadays people and their problems are being reduced to brains and their imbalances. Problems in families and in societies are reduced to problem-children — children who can be ‘fixed’ with a suitable cocktail of drugs. And by offering a quick-fix alternative to the real work of crafting collective pathways to sanity, the pharmaceutical industry has turned a huge profit.

An example of the dangers of a drug-dependent approach to mental health was laid out in a PBS report last year on the medication of foster children. Powerful anti-psychotic drugs that were once only prescribed to adults are now being given to children, less for the benefit of their health than as an expedient form of social management. Kids are being confined in chemical straightjackets. But as one mother says of her adopted son who she has nurtured back to a full life, “he needed understanding, not Depakote; he needed empathy and an ear and a shoulder to cry on, not Zyprexa.”

(If the video below won’t play, go to the site where it was originally posted.)

Watch Fri., Jan. 7, 2011 on PBS. See more from Need To Know.

Guns are for emotional cripples. They help weak people feel strong. They help fearful people feel safe. They offer lonely people the reassuring sensation of cold steel. They protect the freedom of people who don’t enjoy freedom.

Anyone who thinks that owning a gun has something to do with being a real American has confused patriotism with dedication to self-preservation, since no ones gun can protect this country; at most it might protect the guy with his finger on the trigger.

Firmin DeBrabander writes: [A]n armed society — especially as we prosecute it at the moment in this country — is the opposite of a civil society.

The Newtown shootings occurred at a peculiar time in gun rights history in this nation. On one hand, since the mid 1970s, fewer households each year on average have had a gun. Gun control advocates should be cheered by that news, but it is eclipsed by a flurry of contrary developments. As has been well publicized, gun sales have steadily risen over the past few years, and spiked with each of Obama’s election victories.

Furthermore, of the weapons that proliferate amongst the armed public, an increasing number are high caliber weapons (the weapon of choice in the goriest shootings in recent years). Then there is the legal landscape, which looks bleak for the gun control crowd.

Every state except for Illinois has a law allowing the carrying of concealed weapons — and just last week, a federal court struck down Illinois’ ban. States are now lining up to allow guns on college campuses. In September, Colorado joined four other states in such a move, and statehouses across the country are preparing similar legislation. And of course, there was Oklahoma’s ominous Open Carry Law approved by voters this election day — the fifteenth of its kind, in fact — which, as the name suggests, allows those with a special permit to carry weapons in the open, with a holster on their hip.

Individual gun ownership — and gun violence — has long been a distinctive feature of American society, setting us apart from the other industrialized democracies of the world. Recent legislative developments, however, are progressively bringing guns out of the private domain, with the ultimate aim of enshrining them in public life. Indeed, the N.R.A. strives for a day when the open carry of powerful weapons might be normal, a fixture even, of any visit to the coffee shop or grocery store — or classroom.

As N.R.A. president Wayne LaPierre expressed in a recent statement on the organization’s Web site, more guns equal more safety, by their account. A favorite gun rights saying is “an armed society is a polite society.” If we allow ever more people to be armed, at any time, in any place, this will provide a powerful deterrent to potential criminals. Or if more citizens were armed — like principals and teachers in the classroom, for example — they could halt senseless shootings ahead of time, or at least early on, and save society a lot of heartache and bloodshed.

As ever more people are armed in public, however — even brandishing weapons on the street — this is no longer recognizable as a civil society. Freedom is vanished at that point.