In case anyone is wondering, here’s what Charlie Kirk had to say when the state lawmakers were shot in Minneapolis earlier this summer:

“Total shocker that smearing a duly-elected president who won an overwhelming electoral mandate as a fascist or a king leads to violent political radicalization.”

After another shooting in Minneapolis, the one at Annunciation Catholic School, he offered this: “Was the shooter on hormone therapy?” and “Was he on SSRIs? We deserve to know.”

So while it’s obvious violence is terrible when it’s directed anywhere, I think I’m going to try to be better than Charlie Kirk at this moment — it’s about 4 p.m. Wednesday as I write this, and I don’t know Kirk’s condition — I’ll just keep my yap shut for now. I feel nothing anyway, so why embroider on that?

Croaky said something stupid about guns this week, too. “We had lots of guns when we were kids. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so.” He went on to blame psychiatric drugs for the fact they’re now firing them. I don’t know about you, but psychiatric drugs, while no panacea, have brought relief and normalcy to millions of people who suffer from mental illness. The conservative right is now very hot on “mental health,” which they seem to believe was something we all enjoyed until evil liberals took it away.

I’ve always understood the wholesale emptying and closing of public mental hospitals to be a dovetailing of the worse impulses of both the left and the right, the rare case where both sides bear at least some, and perhaps equal blame. I know many of us are older here, and as I recall we’ve talked about it here, too, but I was there and I remember. Liberals said it was cruel and illegal to warehouse people, that new psychiatric drugs offered hope to people who previously could only be treated with Thorazine and other heavy tranquilizers, the ol’ dozin’-and-droolin’ state on American mental wards. The right said, “Close expensive public institutions? Sounds great!” Unfortunately, community-based mental-health buildings never came to pass — they, too, were expensive — and we didn’t reckon that some people with some mental illnesses didn’t want to be treated with the new drugs. They were imperfect, they had unpleasant side effects, and they cost a lot. Lots of mental patients didn’t have any sort of home support network. And so they ended up on the street, almost literally overnight. You saw it too, I bet. It coincided with the closing of SRO hotels in many cities, as yuppies moved downtown and wanted those icky bums out of sight.

So every time a conservative bleats about mental health, ask them: What’s your plan? How much will it cost? Where will people be treated? Because as anyone with even a surface understanding of the issue knows, there aren’t enough beds available now, much less after we start taking the issue as seriously as they think we should. A man off his meds stabbed 11 people in a Walmart in northern Michigan a few weeks ago. It was a familiar story: Paranoid schizophrenic, in and out of treatment and shelters for years, only intermittently in touch with his family, etc. He desperately needed inpatient treatment and a lot of support, but in northern Michigan? Are you crazy?

You could say the same thing about the man who stabbed and killed the Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte. American prisons are already mental hospitals. You want to build a few hundred more? With what money?

Get ready for a new barrage of this, depending on who is arrested for the assault on Kirk.

It’s now 4:45 p.m. Just checked the Salt Lake Tribune, NYT and other sources; they haven’t pulled the sheet up over his face yet. Time will tell.

Edit at three minutes later: He’s dead.