DeSantis Wants To Reduce Mass Shootings by Locking More People in Mental Hospitals

It's unlikely to stop would-be shooters, but it certainly would allow more innocent people to be locked up with little recourse.

In the wake of a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, that killed 18 people, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called for more involuntary institutionalization.

"We do need more institutionalization," DeSantis said during a CNN interview last week. "There are some people who are dangerous to society. A lot of them get put back on the streets. [It] will require more resources, but I think that that's appropriate."

DeSantis presented increased institutionalization as an alternative to nationalizing Florida's red flag law, which allows the state to seize guns owned by an individual experiencing a mental health crisis or who makes violent threats. 

"I think [the red flag law] has been abused because people can just lodge a complaint. Sometimes they'll take somebody's firearms," DeSantis said.

The evidence is indeed dubious that red flag laws are effective at preventing mass shootings, and the statutes often leave individuals with little recourse when their firearms are taken.

"Predicting violence is much harder than advocates of this approach are usually willing to admit, and trying to overcome that challenge by erring on the side of issuing red flag orders inevitably means that many innocent people will lose their Second Amendment rights," wrote Reason's Jacob Sullum in 2022. "The very concept of red flags assumes that experts can reliably distinguish between harmless oddballs and future murderers. But there is little basis for that assumption."

Yet involuntary institutionalization isn't likely to help either. Indeed, making it easier to toss people into mental institutions against their will raises even greater concerns for due process.

Florida already makes it fairly easy to involuntarily institutionalize individuals. The state's Baker Act, passed in 1971, allows mentally ill individuals deemed a threat to themselves or others to be forced into a state hospital for up to 72 hours. While the law technically allows involuntary hospitalization only for those over 18, children as young as 6 have been forced into mental hospitals.

"A 2017 task force report on the involuntary referrals of children under Florida's Baker Act found that one-third of them were not necessary," according to a recent article by Kaitlin Gibbs of the University of Florida Levin College of Law. "Many children are Baker Acted more than once, which shows the initial Baker Act may not have successfully treated children with mental illness. At least thirty percent of all children Baker Acted will have a repeat Baker Act within five years."

Nor is throwing people into mental wards likely to reduce the number of mass shootings. As Ragy Girgis, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University, wrote in 2022, "Serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder." And while 25 percent of mass shootings "are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression," he notes that "in most cases these conditions are incidental."

In the case of last week's murders in Maine, the shooter, 40-year-old Robert Card, was hospitalized during the summer. But officials say there is no evidence this hospitalization was involuntary. And Card's history of mental illness makes him unusual among other mass murderers.

"Arguably one of the best such reports on the topic, conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, found that only 25% of [mass shooters] had a diagnosed mental illness," wrote the psychiatrist John Rozel and the sociologist Jeffrey Swanson in January. "Although it is difficult to obtain precise data on the gun-prohibited status of every mass shooter, less than 5% of these individuals had a record of a gun-disqualifying mental health adjudication."

If DeSantis' plan were enacted, the likely result would be a rapid increase in the unnecessary institutionalization of mentally ill individuals—and a negligible impact on criminal violence. If taking people's guns is a violation of their rights, forcing them into a mental facility surely is too.