Palm Beach County sheriff gets $1 million for violence prevention unit

From: Palm Beach Post

Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf.

Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers. The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed.

The goal will be avoiding crime — and making sure law enforcement knows about potential powder kegs before tragedies occur, Bradshaw said. But the earmark, which is a one-time-only funding provision, provoked a debate Monday among mental health advocates and providers about the balance between civil liberties, privacy and protecting the public.

Bradshaw said his proposal is a first-of-its-kind in the nation, and he hopes it will become a model for the rest of the state like his gang prevention and pill-mill units.

“Every single incident, whether it’s Newtown, that movie theater, or the guy who spouts off at work and then goes home and kills his wife and two kids — in every single case, there were people who said they knew ahead of time that there was a problem,” Bradshaw said. “If the neighbor of the mom in Newtown had called somebody, this might have saved 25 kids’ lives.”

Bradshaw is readying a hotline and is planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.

The goal won’t be to arrest troubled people but to get them help before there’s violence, Bradshaw said. As a side benefit, law enforcement will have needed information to keep a close eye on things.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’ ”

That’s enough for Senate budget chief Joe Negron, R-Stuart, who helped push through the funding last weekend.

He said he met with Bradshaw about the program and “got assurances from the sheriff that this is going to be done in a way that respects people’s autonomy and privacy, and that he makes sure to protect against people making false claims.”

Mental health advocates, however, worry about a potential new source of stigma, and the potential for erosion of the civil rights of people with mental illnesses.

“How are they possibly going to watch everybody who makes a comment like that? It’s subjective,” said Liz Downey, executive director of the Palm Beach County branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “We don’t want to take away people’s civil liberties just because people aren’t behaving the way we think they should be.”

Bradshaw acknowledged the risk that anyone in a messy divorce or in a dispute with a neighbor could abuse the hotline. But, he said, he’s confident that his trained professionals will know how to sort out fact from fiction.

“We know how to sift through frivolous complaints,” he said.

The proposal still needs the blessing of Gov. Rick Scott, who has line-item veto authority.

But if it goes forward, Palm Beach County’s already stretched mental health and substance abuse providers could find themselves even busier. There is no ready source of funds once the $1 million runs its course, as there hasn’t been an increase to community mental health funding in many years.

“Our community agencies throughout the state don’t have the funds to meet the needs they have currently,” said Bob Sharpe, CEO of the Florida Council for Community Mental Health. “It sounds like it could work, but with no new funding we’d have to find it within existing resources.”

If Bradshaw’s teams can keep people out of crisis units and promote early intervention, that has the potential to save money, said Ann Berner, CEO of the Southeast Florida Behavioral Health Network, which manages mental health care payments for the state.

To be successful, however, there will have to be close coordination with the mental health providers, she said. For example, the county already pays for mobile crisis response teams at two nonprofit mental health providers, a service that includes a 24-hour crisis call center. They, too, are trained to de-escalate conflicts and refer troubled people to care. Which ones will respond when there’s a call from a school or a home? That will have to be clarified.

Also, after troubled people are identified by Bradshaw’s teams, then what? Who will pay for their care? The state? Medicaid? The county? The Palm Beach County Public Defender has a good program to ensure qualified people apply for the Social Security and Medicaid benefits they may need, she said. Some high-level conversations have started, but more are needed, Berner added.

“I think that would be an area we really need to collaborate on, and soon,” she said.

The $1 million Bradshaw won represents a third of what he had sought from the Legislature, but it’s a 10-fold bump from what was originally earmarked before House and Senate budget leaders finalized the state’s $74 billion budget over the weekend.

New Hampshire Union Leader Editorial on Ayotte's gun vote

From: New Hampshire Union Leader

A senator's job is to study the issues that come before the Senate, to engage thoughtfully in debate and to cast a considered vote. On the Senate's voluminous gun control legislation, Sen. Kelly Ayotte did that job incredibly well. And for that she has been attacked by partisans on both sides whose emotional outbursts demonstrate why we need a Senate in the first place.

When the Manchin-Toomey amendment to Sen. Barbara Boxer's gun control bill emerged as the best hope for getting any gun legislation passed this year, many conservative activists pressed Republicans to kill it by filibuster. Ayotte voted to bring it to the floor for debate. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, among others, urged the Tea Party to remember that vote, suggesting that Ayotte deserved to be primaried out of her Senate seat simply for allowing a bill with questionable support to be debated.

Ayotte wound up voting against the bill, which failed on a 54-46 vote (both sides had agreed to a 60-vote threshold for passage). She reasoned that it would impose a hefty burden on gun dealers without producing a justifiable increase in public safety. For that the left has accused her of not caring about the deaths of children.

At a town hall meeting in Warren on Tuesday, Erica Lafferty, daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal killed last November, asked Ayotte about her vote. "You had mentioned that the burden to owners of gun stores that these expanded background checks would cause. I'm just wondering why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the hall of her elementary school isn't as important as that?"

Ayotte explained her vote and explained that the background check bill would have done nothing to prevent the Newtown shootings. That fact has been pointed out by numerous news organizations. Lafferty was unmoved.

"It's disappointing and disgusting that she can pretty much look me in the eye and try to justify my mother's murder and the murder of five other educators and the murders of 6- and 7-year-olds," Lafferty told Politico afterwards. "It's disgusting."

No, what is disgusting is deliberately mischaracterizing someone's position for the purpose of portraying that person as a willing accomplice to murder. That has been the left's strategy since Newtown. It is a testament to the Senate that a majority of its members, including Ayotte, did not cave to such bullying.

Newtown and Gosnell: A tale of two massacres

From: WashingtonExaminer.com

You might not know it, but there's a mass murder trial going on in Philadelphia. There has been plenty of courtroom drama, and the death penalty remains a possibility.

The media are seldom shy about such sensational affairs, but they have been with one. Perhaps it's because the accused mass murderer is an abortion doctor, who along with his medically untrained staff is accused of killing a female patient and several babies who had already been born, alive and breathing.

Doctor Kermit Gosnell's preferred method of killing these latter, according to witnesses, was to sever their spinal cords. Upon his arrest in January 2011, his urine-scented and blood-soaked clinic was deemed a "house of horrors." (I will spare readers further details, which are far worse.)

This trial's gruesome revelations are emerging at almost the same time as new details about the loathsome and cowardly murderer who killed his own mother and then 26 others at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., late last year.

Some will find the comparison inappropriate, but from a political perspective, Gosnell's trial is to abortion what Sandy Hook is to gun ownership.

Both are emotional cases with horrific details that cry out for public policy debates. And in each case, the debate pits public safety against something widely considered a constitutional right.

The two cases are different in that Sandy Hook received wall-to-wall coverage and thus facilitated a national conversation about mental health and gun control -- a debate whose outcome is yet to be determined.

Not so with the Gosnell trial, which has been completely blacked out by the media. The American people are now like a jury, shielded from relevant information because judges (read: editors) decided it might prejudice their views -- in this case, against lightly regulated abortionists.

Whatever one's position on gun control, the appropriately heavy coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre at least served a public purpose by starting a discussion about mass shootings.

At its most thoughtful, the debate considered what measures might have prevented the massacre and which could be squared with Americans' constitutional rights.

At its worst, the debate suffered from media cheerleading for panic gun control legislation -- as in, "pass something, anything!" -- including but not limited to such left-leaning figures as CNN's Piers Morgan.

In stark contrast, television coverage of Gosnell's trial has been "hard to find," as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan put it very charitably last Sunday on "Meet the Press."

In fact, not counting Noonan's allusion, Gosnell's case has not been mentioned even once on any of the three major networks in the last month (his trial began March 18).

It has received only seven mentions on cable television since it began, one on CNN and six on Fox News. In print, Gosnell's case has been largely ignored outside of local media outlets in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

It's not as though there isn't an obvious connection between the Gosnell case and public policy. Legislators in some states (including Pennsylvania and now Alabama) have acted since Gosnell's arrest to crack down on the next abortion quack.

The media have collectively and perhaps deliberately failed to draw the obvious connection between the two stories.

The month after Gosnell's arrest, Virginia's legislature approved new health and safety rules for abortion clinics on a nearly straight party-line vote in 2011.

Gov. Bob McDonnell, R, approved the new rules three months ago. Last week, amid Gosnell's trial, abortion rights groups unashamedly announced they had submitted thousands of comments in opposition. The state Board of Health is expected to hand down a final decision next week.

Many have asked what kind of law they could pass to prevent the next Newtown. Few are writing about how to prevent the next Kermit Gosnell.

Given the frequent claim that abortion is safer for being legal, and the eagerness of the abortion rights lobby to distance itself from Gosnell, why such incredible and inflexible resistance to basic safety regulations?

The gun lobby is often accused of resisting any new gun law as if it were the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. The liberal editors who are keeping Kermit Gosnell's case off the air should ask themselves whether they aren't taking sides in the culture war.

Or can public health, public safety and public debate be subordinated to the question of whose camel's nose is going under whose tent?

Bob Schieffer Compares Obama Gun Control to Defeating Nazis

Nick Gillespie On Gun Control

From: Reason.com

Last Monday's episode of The Daily Show (watch it here), Jon Stewart opened with a long, heartfelt, and sardonically witty segment that showcased the stupidity of some well-known gun-rights advocates. In many ways, that segment perfectly captures the desire for what President Obama has called "common-sense" gun control laws that will prevent horrific tragedies like December's Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

It's worth thinking about where Stewart is coming from, and not simply because he hosts a TV show that has supposedly replaced network news as the main source of information and analysis for most of America. Stewart makes a lot of good points, or at least points worth thinking about. In the end, though, he comes up well short of proposing meaningful reforms. In that failure, too, he's capturing the anti-gun zeitgeist.

In The Daily Show bit, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre was shown namechecking 20-year-old movies such as Natural Born Killers and equally ancient video games such as Mortal Kombat as the proximate cause for the Sandy Hook school shooting. LaPierre even called for a national database of lunatics, though the loud-mouthed hysteric declined the chance to be the first entry.

Obama plans to surround himself with children during gun control announcement

From: WashingtonExaminer.com

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced this afternoon that President Obama will unveil a “concrete package” of gun control proposals including assault weapons bans, high capacity ammunition magazine bans, and closing loopholes on background checks.

Carney said that the president will be joined by Vice President Joe Biden as well as children who wrote to the president after the Newtown shootings.

“They will be joined by children around the country expressing their concerns about gun violence and school safety, along with their parents,” Carney confirmed.

The press conference will take place Wednesday at 11:45 a.m.