Those who support the insanity defense argue that it lends moral credence to criminal law. Perhaps the real problem is trying to find a formula that preserves the public's sanity. Put bluntly, acquittals such as Hinckley's insult our gut instincts and our primitive sense of justice. "Is Hinckley's crime," the trial prosecutor asked, "the crime of someone who does not know what he is doing and who is out of control, or is it the crime of someone who has an evil, twisted and perverted mind?" The difference between being sick and depressed, psychotic and merely "sad at Christmas," underscored the trial debate. While the prosecution emphasized Hinckley's act, the defense attempted to show that the illogical, disjointed association between Hinckley's violence and his fantasy world was sign of process schizophrenia.

DEMANDS for reform after the trial were loud, political and, according to Caplan, inconclusive. The hope was somehow to reconcile that natural gut reaction which sees the act, the victim, the murderer and calls a spade a spade with the more informed need to preserve conceptions of human will, avoid the connection between illness and evil, and abstain from seeking the hypocritical solution of committing the sick to prisons that offer no treatment or hospitals that are no better than prisons. Discussion centered on two legal reforms: allowing for a verdict of guilty but insane; and restricting the scope of the defense by limiting judgment to a defendant's criminal intent (mens rea is the proper legal term) at the moment of the crime.

Neither change could move towards a clear resolution of the debate. The contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in each tend only to underline the sensitivity of cases in which mental responsibility is an issue. For a jury, Caplan argues, that is "not able to rule with confidence that a defendant was sane, both 'guilty but mentally ill' and 'guilty but insane' permit the evasion of the hard, unqualified choice between guilty or not guilty usually required by the criminal law." The move towards a double standard of judicial judgment for the mentally ill is tantamount to making constitutional a cynical and callous assessment of the status of a fellow citizen. The proposed mens rea standard (already accepted in certain states) seems ambiguous at best. The question of intent or motivation, separate from the crucial one of illness, is thorny and puts us closer to equating illness with "evil." In any case, restricting a legal rule will hardly deter the actions of those who would normally use it. The convicted ill would only become mistreated, untreated prisoners. The small numbers and type of accused, it seems, must force the debate into less charted ground and away from simplistic solutions. The legal and medical discussion of just how sick sick is will continue.

What could be stopped, of course, is the ability of the sick to purchase firearms. Though John Hinckley was under psychiatric care and taking prescriptive drugs long before the shootings, he succeeded in buying guns on ten different occasions.

At one point, only months before the attempt on Reagan's life, Hinckley was arrested for carrying firearms on a plane bound for Nashville. He was fined sixty dollars, held for a few hours and released. Hours after the Washington shootings, a copy of the Second Amendment, which guarantees (depending on one's interpretation) "the right of the people to bear arms..." was discovered in Hinckley's wallet.

It is an older issue, but no less pressing in the wake of what has recently been characterized as a rash of "insane" political violence. A judicial system that judges the sick and arms the sane simultaneously, without thinking of the two together, may well be the most frightening of judicial delusions.