Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Like so many of us here in Coeur d’Alene, I had an indirect connection with one of the firemen who was murdered by that madman on June 29, 2025. My connection was much less intimate than most. One of the slain was father to a student whom I taught for two years and knew for more.
The world was a better place with men like this among us. We are diminished by their absence. Family, friends, loved ones, and brother first responders are now endeavoring to endure the unendurable. Words cannot encompass such grief. May God stand between them and harm in all of the dark places they must walk.
When I first learned of the situation as it developed, I feared that it was the beginnings of something far more organized and purposeful than it turned out to be. This is because we Americans have many enemies overseas. Tens of millions of military-aged foreigners, many from those enemy nations, have been permitted to illegally enter U.S. territory. To expect some kind of Fifth Column or Guerilla Army to unmask itself in the event of a conflict with one of these foes is not unreasonable.
This local ambush happened only eight days after President Trump struck down Iran’s nuclear hopes. Facing an avenging Iranian militia striking civilian targets from our local mountains would be a nightmare the likes of which Americans have not seen in living memory. Not since Quantrill’s Raiders and the bloody Kansas-Missouri raids during the American Civil War have Americans faced organized large scale guerilla warfare.
I thank God that my fears were baseless.
However, the reality of yet one more broken, suicidal murderer is merely a different flavor of hell-on-earth. How could such a person be permitted to walk freely until their psychoses exploded in needless murder and suicide?
In no way am I advocating any form of gun control. My experiences living in the Bronx in the 1970s make it utterly clear to me that more armed citizens of sound mind and body make for safer streets and neighborhoods. It is not the tool that is at fault. Rather, it is the broken mind that employs any tool for an evil purpose that we must face.
In 1967, filmmaker Frederick Wiseman wrote and produced “Titicut Follies”. This avant-garde film was cobbled together from weeks of filming that was done inside an insane asylum. Edited carefully to tell a specific story, the film illustrated a contention that all such institutions were inherently brutal and needlessly cruel.
Along with the far more famous “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Titicut Follies” was part of a wave of propaganda that helped convince a critical mass of influential Americans that insane asylums were no longer acceptable in our progressing society.
From the mid-1970s, America de-institutionalized. Most of those whose special needs had been served in asylums were shifted from residing in large-scale mental health and retardation institutions into small scale community-based group homes.
Therapeutic, psychiatric, and pharmaceutical services were radically decentralized. Most people with special needs were scattered into neighborhoods across the United States. This was intended to be a humane remedy to the perceived cruelty of large-scale insane asylums.
In some cases, this shift was beneficial. For higher-functioning people with developmental disabilities, living in small scale homes where they were served by direct care workers who knew them personally offered a better life.
However, for those with more profound developmental disabilities (mental retardation), their physical setting was far less relevant to their quality-of-life than their mental characteristics.
Further, serving those with mental illness is a wholly different task than caring for those with developmental disabilities. Whether temporary or more permanent, those with certain mental illnesses can pose a deadly threat to others. For the safety of all, those plagued by such conditions need to be contained.
The new community-based model for care stresses the imagined benefits for individuals with special needs over the safety of others within society. While asylums-by-any-other-name are maintained at a small scale for those with the most dangerous diagnoses, the vast majority of dangerously troubled people have not been contained by this new system.
I was personally involved in de-institutionalizing residents from Pineland Center in Maine during the early 1990s. I was hired to develop and manage a brand new residential program for adults with developmental disabilities. While I saw much good, I also saw just how much could go wrong in this community-based model.
Large-scale homelessness began to appear simultaneously with deinstitutionalization. This is no coincidence. Modern homelessness is a direct result of de-institutionalization. For the past fifty years, Americans have been taught that it is heartless and hateful to recognize this connection.
Advocates for the homeless question: who are parents and other citizens to insist that their communities should not abide the mentally ill homeless taking over streets, libraries, parks, and other public spaces? How dare anyone assume that the standards of their “sanity” trumps the rights of those with mental illness to live their lives within and beyond the least restrictive
environment.
None of this is normal. None of this is inevitable. Federal and state governments should reinvest in new, large scale insane asylums. These should be revived with sufficient resources to insure genuinely humane treatment.
New vagrancy laws should also be instituted. Law enforcement needs such laws in order to protect communities from dangerous transients. Such vagrants could then be moved out of the locality. As part of this process, each transient could be assessed for dangerous mental illness. If found to be at risk or a risk to others, these individuals could be institutionalized for their own good as well as for the common good.
Treatment and safety are better remedies to those with broken minds and spirits than languishing on the street to die alone. Re-institutionalization coupled with a revival of vagrancy laws would be nothing less than prudent, compassionate, and humane. In future, people like the local murder-suicide might be stopped, contained, and treated before the murder of innocents.
Lives could be saved.
