Even by the depraved standards of the current Democratic leadership this is a shameful example of putting partisan politics above national welfare.

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There are certain issues on which America — goaded by a perpetually breathless media — can become too hysterical to react reasonably in the moment. The best example in recent years: gun violence.

Whether it was the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut; the attack on a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, or the Arizona rampage that nearly claimed the life of then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the country has seen far too many examples in recent years of crazed gunmen inflicting horrible, anarchistic violence on innocent bystanders.

It’s understandable that such intensely traumatic experiences lead to an immediate search for justice; a quest for a method of ensuring such tragedies never occur again. Of course, as many conservatives have pointed out in the years since those shootings, there is no perfect response. The crooked timber of humanity, after all, can never be made straight. We’ll never be completely rid of wicked people anxious to distribute suffering as widely as possible.

Just because the problem can’t be fixed in its entirety, however, doesn’t mean that it can’t be ameliorated. For liberals, the typical response has been to call for sweeping new gun control measures, which seems suspiciously like an answer that was simply waiting for the right question.

Focusing on the gun itself is analytically unjustifiable. The number of deaths caused by firearms each year has hovered roughly around the number of fatalities from automobile accidents. In both cases, every use of the underlying technology has the potential to cause injury or death. In both cases, however, the number of instances where an actual fatality results are so small that they make the impulse to ban the technology itself a ludicrous overreaction.

What’s even more curious about the default liberal position is that the shooters in Connecticut, Colorado and Arizona were not exactly a random sample of firearm owners. All three gunmen were suffering from severe mental illness. Any serious effort to get at the underlying problem would point to that as the proximate cause of the chaos they created.

Now that the initial trauma surrounding each of those shootings has passed, there have been hopeful signs on Capitol Hill that Congress might just get the response right. Representative Tim Murphy, a Republican (and psychologist) from Pennsylvania is currently sponsoring a piece of legislation that would seek to correct many of the deficiencies currently plaguing the nation’s handling of the mentally ill.

To understand our current shortcomings, you have to understand the history of treating mental illness.  In decades past, journalistic exposés about the squalid conditions in asylums — not to mention pop culture treatments like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — led to widespread revulsion at how we treated the mentally ill. Some of those impulses were justified, but they led to an overcorrection. What resulted was a legal framework that makes it excessively difficult to mandate treatment for troubled individuals or even to inform parents and caregivers of the nature of their plight.

It is appropriate that the country had misgivings on this topic. It’s no small matter to deprive someone of their liberty to the point of mandating treatment or institutionalization. It bears remembering, however, that our conceptions of freedom are predicated on notions of personal responsibility that simply don’t apply to those whose illness leaves them unable to make any reasonable distinctions between right and wrong. The failure to account for the fact led to today’s disequilibrium: where the severely afflicted are given too much autonomy and those who they could harm are given too little protection.

Murphy — who spent a year researching the areas of mental health care in most dire need of reform before introducing the bill —hopes to remedy that imbalance. His legislation would shift the focus of mental health efforts to those with the most serious afflictions (current policy is promiscuous in its definition of what constitutes mental illness), revamp privacy laws so that those closest to the individual have access to more information about his or her malady, make it easier to institutionalize an individual believed to be a threat, increase outpatient assistance and overhaul a federal bureaucracy that too often advocates to keep the mentally ill out of treatment regardless of the implications.

One would think such efforts would be relatively uncontroversial — a supposition strengthened by the fact that about one-third of Murphy’s co-sponsors are Democrats. There’s no issue immune to being tainted by craven politics, however, which is why it’s unsurprising that a rival bill — sponsored by Ron Barber, an Arizona Congressman who is a former Gabby Giffords staffer, but allegedly engineered largely by Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman — has emerged to take the wind out of Murphy’s sails. Their proposed solution: ignoring Murphy’s proposals and throwing more money at the mental health status quo. And they’re making no secret of their efforts to peel off Murphy’s support and direct it to their own bill.

Why the political jockeying? (A) Because congressional Democrats don’t want to give Republicans a bipartisan victory in an election year, and (B) because liberals in Washington are terrified that efforts to address mental health directly will undercut the gun control efforts they’ve been advancing in the wake of the aforementioned shootings.

Even by the depraved standards of the current Democratic leadership this is a shameful example of putting partisan politics above national welfare. The potential victims of liberal posturing won’t just be the mentally ill who’ll never find a road to recovery without the passage of Representative Murphy’s bill; it’ll also be all those who will be put in harm’s way because of the inadequacy of the present system. If this gambit succeeds — if Murphy’s vital piece of legislation really does die by Nancy Pelosi’s hands — than any notion that the progressive movement is committed to compassion should die with it.