That was the conclusion most people reached in trying to figure out why Charles Guiteau assassinated President James A Garfield. I’ve been reading Candace Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is a fascinating and well-paced account of Guiteau’s assassination attempt upon James A Garfield and the botched medical care that resulted in his death. There is much in Guiteau’s life that seems to parallel many of the contemporary “shooters” who are also mentally unstable.
James A Garfield
Guiteau was know to be unstable by family, friends, and the Oneida community of which he was a part for some time. He was a frustrated job seeker with associates of Garfield who all recognized him as unstable and ultimately barred him from the White House. Family members who knew him sought to institutionalize him without success. Part of the trouble was that he was not only unstable–he was wily as well. He took up lodgings but left just ahead of the rent collector. He proposed fantastic business schemes and borrowed from friends but nothing paid out and no one got paid back.
Like some shooters, he had never before acted out violently. After his frustrations with job-seeking in the Garfield administration and seeing Garfield’s friendship with Secretary of State James Blaine, who he considered evil, he concluded that God was telling him that Garfield must be removed. Even still, he wrote letters to the Garfield administration, which might have been a tip off. Barred from the White House, he learned that Garfield was leaving Washington on a train, and ambushed him in the train station. (These were the days when presidents still walked unaccompanied by Secret Service, who only pursued counterfeiting, something they still do.)
Guiteau thought the would be rescued from prison by a grateful country. His case was one of the first to use an insanity defense, unsuccessfully. Awaiting a verdict, he planned a lecture tour. He reputedly danced on the way to the gallows and recited a poem he wrote, I am Going to the Lordy as he awaited hanging.
Charles J Guiteau
What Guiteau illustrates for me is that we have yet, 130 years later to figure out how to care for our mentally ill. He never sought help nor thought he was ill, and he was functional enough that no one else could institutionalize him. He was an unrecognized threat until after the fact. As a country, we are loathe to impair civil liberties short of a criminal act. And we have very few facilities to care for the mentally ill who need more than outpatient treatment. Several things I wonder about though:
1. For those who cannot function well in society and need some type of ongoing care, often they end up living on the streets, if there are no family able or willing to care for them. Can’t we do better than that. And if government can’t, I wonder if the churches and other religious institutions can provide some kind of group housing and compassionate care.
2. I do wonder if there is also some way to require those who refuse care to be subject to some form of electronic surveillance that would include an alert feature to all gun sellers that would disqualify them from purchasing weapons. Such could also be used for screening in public settings to alert those protecting movie stars, political figures, and school children from harm. The challenge would be that there needs to be some kind of due process even here–two unrelated people and a medical professional attesting to their instability, for example. This would still allow such persons to be at liberty in society if they refuse treatment, and yet provide some degree of protection to the public.
I can hear the protests to such an idea, and it feels “big brother-ish” to me as well. There would need to be strong protections against using such technology against a whole class of people (an ethnic or religious group, for example). Except the fact is, big brother is watching via NSA surveillance, traffic cams and other closed circuit TV systems, and we voluntarily have given Google, Amazon, and others massive amounts of our personal data. Could this not be used to provide some measure of protection to society and even to the person themselves. In some ways this seems as great and present a danger as those who would engaged in acts of terror.
3. Finally, we do need to find ways to provide treatment to those who seek it, including war veterans with brain injuries. There are still mysteries in treatment of these things, but what a tragedy when those who need help can’t receive what help is needed.
