Transgender Nazi Aspiring School Shooter Is Latest Example of Why Mental Asylums Are Necessary

The world is filled with people who are not mentally competent, and a large fraction of them are dangerous. And a substantial fraction of those are known to be dangerous before they erupt into violence. 

Will she be put in a male prison? Important question which can’t be addressed unless you explain Felix is female. https://t.co/ZIWsVFL9v5

— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) July 30, 2025

So we get stories like this one:

A murder-obsessed teenager who spoke of carrying out a mass shooting at an Edinburgh school has been jailed for six years.

A court heard Felix Winter, who is now 18, "idolised" the killers behind the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the US.

The pupil repeatedly spoke about mounting a similar "Doomsday" attack to the one which claimed the lives of 12 students and a teacher in Colorado.

Winter, who also held racist and pro-Nazi views, admitted two charges at a hearing in February.

The High Court in Glasgow heard the offences - a breach of the peace and a charge under the Terrorism Act - were committed when he was aged 15 and 16 between June 2022 and July 2023.

Shelagh McCall KC, defending, called for a strict alternative to custody as her client was a "vulnerable young person" with mental health issues.

But the court was told Winter had been "radicalised", having spent more than 1,000 hours in contact with a pro-Nazi online Discord group.

The judge said it appeared Winter had been in contact with the extremist online group for two hours a day for two years.

Lord Arthurson told the court the teenager had also discussed with fellow pupils his "visceral, violent and graphically detailed plan" to carry out a massacre.

In a January 2023 journal entry he described his school as a "virus upon this earth" and added he would soon prove that "I am a God".

Lord Arthurson added: "The whole material available to me indicate that you were progressing towards the brink of perpetrating a mass school shooting, you were radicalised and your statement of intent could not clearer."

Winter had been twice referred - in November 2022 and June 2023 - to the UK-wide Prevent counter terrorism programme.

It places public bodies, including schools and the police, under a legal duty to identify people who may turn to extremism, and intervene in their lives before it is too late.

Police Scotland launched an investigation in the summer of 2023 after a social media photo of Winter at school wearing combat gear and carrying an imitation gun caused panic among pupils and parents.

It emerged the clothes and prop gun were issued to him for a video being made in a drama class in which he had been cast as a kidnapper.

But detectives established Winter, of Kirknewton, West Lothian, frequently spoke to other pupils about carrying out a school attack.

He also "exhibited a variety of alarming behaviours" over a 13-month period.

A known wolf, who at least in this case was stopped before he/she--Felix is transgender--committed an atrocity. 

Notice that Felix was referred to "Prevent," a program that is supposed to steer radicalized people away from committing atrocities. It doesn't work, as we have seen from past incidents, in which known wolves go on to commit heinous acts. 

Some of those people belong in jail or deported. Some, though, belong in mental institutions. Their "radicalization" is more about finding a way to cope. That's not an excuse; it's a reason to incarcerate and treat them. They belong inside, not outside, because they cannot cope with the real world. 

I think about this fact a lot, because one of the reasons why society is descending into chaos is that we closed down insane asylums and put a lot of people who shouldn't be out on the streets--sometimes literally on the streets, where we step over them on our way to work or to get a cup of coffee. 

We closed mental institutions because they were often run very badly, or treated mentally ill people cruelly, or even experimented on the mentally ill, turning them into victims of a system that denied their humanity. Decent people recoiled, and other decent people argued that there was a better way--treatment, but in the world, not behind closed doors. 

The anger over mistreatment was justified, but the solution was to export the cruelty to society as a whole. Few of the mentally ill got treatment, many fell into homelessness, and others are now criminals. Jails are filled with mentally ill people--we are incarcerating the mentally ill again, only in worse conditions. 

Now, everybody is worse off. And many of those well-meaning people have responded by insisting that mentally ill people are simply "Queer" or "neurodivergent." The standard of sanity is a social construct and oppressive. This idea originated in the Critical Theory academic literature of the 1950s and 1960s and is now widely held on the left. 

Not every difference from the norm is mental illness--society can use norms to oppress, of course. But while there can be discussion about where exactly to draw the line between sane but weird and insane, there are plenty of people so far from normal and so prone to self- or other-directed destruction that we should all be able to agree. 

Transgender Nazi proto-school shooter fits the bill nicely. Anybody who chooses to live on the street qualifies. Those people muttering gibberish to themselves on the sidewalk belong in institutions, not as zombies roaming the cities scaring everybody. 

Mental institutions need not be designed to be cruel. That was an artifact of a long history, limited resources, and a tolerance for nearly psychotic "science" that treated human beings as test subjects. We spend trillions to subsidize able-bodied people who choose not to work, billions on feeding and housing illegal aliens, and untold amounts of money chasing down, prosecuting, and incarcerating people who belong in mental institutions. 

Take a chunk of that money and build actual sanitariums for the mentally ill that treat these people as human beings who need help. 

For those who worry about the potential cruelty, I hear and feel you. But look at how we treat so many of the mentally ill today. It is functionally worse than we did in the 1940s and 50s. It's a cruelty of neglect, or of waiting for them to explode and then punishing them more harshly.

We shove the blame elsewhere, rather than confront the reality before our eyes.