Over the weekend in Seattle, yet another murder by an allegedly mentally ill person occurred.  A popular English professor at a local community college was killed while walking through Seattle’s Pioneer Square after a soccer game.  But unlike other murders where someone with a mental illness randomly kills and attacks, you probably won’t hear about this one, except in local media, for one reason – the killer used a knife, not a gun.

Troy Wolff died after being stabbed multiple times by someone who police are currently investigating as someone with “diminished mental capacity.”  He died trying to protect his girlfriend, who was the initial target of a crazy man with a knife.  She is still in serious condition at the hospital, and the assailant was arrested by Seattle police at the scene.

For Seattleites, this is a terrible flashback to yet another random murder 16 years ago, when Dan Van Ho, a mentally ill man, randomly murdered retired fire captain Stanley Stevenson with a butcher knife as he walked back to his car with his family after a baseball game.  Ho was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the state mental institution.

We hear all the time about the mentally ill who get their hands on a gun and commit murders.  Think about what we have learned about alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, or, back in Seattle, the known mental illness of Ian Stawicki, who entered a coffee shop over a year and a half ago and started shooting.  He killed 5 people in that café, then killed a woman in the process of carjacking her vehicle.  Seattle police eventually shot and killed him, but the carnage left was heart-wrenching and devastating.  His family knew he was mentally ill, but claims to have had no idea that he was capable of this kind of violence, even though he had assaulted family members in the past.

The Café Racer shootings, as they are known locally, made national news.  Troy Wolff’s murder will not.  There is nothing compelling about his story to the national media.  Locally, his murder will be forgotten, except by those who knew him.  And the courts, the police, and the public will still not look mental illness in the eye and confront the terrible truths that keep claiming innocent lives.

While those on the left like to repeat how “Reagan closed mental health hospitals” and blame the right (which is a myth), there is no denying that it is now left-leaning and left-wing groups like the ACLU who are now blocking and making it near to impossible to get people with mental illnesses committed to get help.  The courts are so concerned with not infringing on the “rights” of the mentally ill to continue to be mentally ill, especially if they refuse counseling, medication, or any other treatment, that they completely overlook the rights of people not to be assaulted or murdered by those same mentally ill people.

The rules on involuntary commitment in Washington State are rightly stringent, but extraordinarily limited when it comes to a longer period than 72 hours.  Of course, family members have to admit that their loved one actually has a problem that makes them a danger to themselves or to others.  In many of these cases, family members were either willfully blind or could not convince the courts that the mentally ill person was a dangerous individual.  And naturally, we only hear about these mentally ill people once an innocent person, or many innocent people, have died at their hands.

Troy Wolff died as the result of knife wounds, not gun shots.  His death is not any less tragic or regretted than those who lost their lives in Aurora, or Newtown, or at Café Racer.  But his death won’t stir the same outrage because of his manner of death.  If he had been killed with a gun, there would be endless debate on how someone mentally ill got a hold of a firearm.  There will not be any debate on how a mentally ill person got a hold of a knife.  There won’t be a call to ban knives.  There won’t be a “national discussion” on how to keep knives out of the hands of the mentally ill.  Troy Wolff will simply be another sad statistic, unless we finally, FINALLY decide to treat the issue of mentally ill people who have a known history of violence seriously.  We have to think about if we, as a society, want to continue to pretend that the violent and mentally disturbed among us are not going to make someone that we love into the next statistic.  We have to take mental illness seriously by involuntarily committing people and getting them real help, which means moving real money into those kinds of programs.  I can tell you what that would look like in Seattle – no more money for bike lanes or walking trails, for example – but that would upset too many special interest groups who want that money.

So those interest groups will wring their hands over a dead man, who died protecting someone he cared about.  But because his death doesn’t further their political beliefs, and may even make them think about unhappy things like locking crazy and dangerous people up indefinitely, as soon as they are done wringing their hands, they will open them back up to get more public money for their special projects.  They can keep hoping that the next mentally ill person who snaps and kills doesn’t hurt anyone they care about.

Those are odds that, eventually, the innocent end up paying for.