Greetings! Welcome to Thursday, June 25, 2026. Glad you're here for our daily visit. Today, I'm reliably advised, is National Catfish Day, National Strawberry Parfait Day, National Handshake Day, and amusingly, it's National Leon day — the day that marks us as halfway to Christmas. (Leon is Noel, backwards.)
1798: President John Adams signs into law the Alien Friends Act, authorizing the president to deport any foreigner deemed "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States."
1867: First barbed wire patented by Lucien B. Smith of Ohio.
1876: Battle of the Little Bighorn: 7th Cavalry under Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer is wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.
1910: Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird for the Ballets Russes premieres at the Opéra de Paris, Paris.
1929: President Herbert Hoover authorizes the construction of Boulder Dam, now known as Hoover Dam.
1949: Warner Bros. Cartoons releases "Long-Haired Hare," an animated short film directed by Chuck Jones, featuring Bugs Bunny disguised as conductor Leopold Stokowski tormenting an opera singer.
1950: North Korea invades South Korea, beginning the Korean War.
1964: 570/WMCA radio in NYC plays The Beatles' A Hard Days Night album 10 days prior to its scheduled release date; record company moves release to June 26.
1973: John Dean begins testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee.
1981: Supreme Court upholds male-only draft registration as constitutional.
Birthdays Today Include: George Abbott, theater producer and film director (Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game); Eric Blair, AKA George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984); Eric Carle, author (The Very Hungry Caterpillar); Eddie Floyd, singer-songwriter (The Falcons, 1957-63; solo - "Knock on Wood," "Raise Your Hand"); Harold Melvin, R&B singer (The Blue Notes - "If You Don't Know Me By Now," "Bad Luck"); Carly Simon, singer-songwriter ("Anticipation," "You're So Vain"); Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef; and Ricky Gervais, comedian.
If today is your day, too, Happy Birthday to ya!
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I'm willing to bet most of you have never heard of Naomi Guzman. Until a few weeks ago, neither had I. The system that failed her victims made sure of that.
Here's what happened. On April 14, 2026, Guzman — a 31-year-old Omaha woman — walked into a Walmart, shoplifted a kitchen knife, grabbed a three-year-old child at knifepoint, and forced the child's caretaker outside at the point of the blade. When officers confronted her, she didn't drop the weapon. She slashed the child across the face and hand. Officers shot and killed her. The child survived — but only after surgeons repaired serious facial injuries that never should have happened.
That should enrage you. But the backstory will make your blood boil.
Reporters dug into Guzman's history and found a catastrophic paper trail. In 2024, she attacked her father with a knife. She tried to burn his house down. She broke into the rectory at St. Frances Cabrini Church, armed with a knife, and caused extensive damage while a priest barricaded himself inside and waited for rescue. Those incidents generated four felony charges.
And what did the system do with four felony charges, a knife, an arson attempt, and a terrorized priest? You know the answer here, don’t you. It let her go. The court declared her not guilty by reason of insanity and handed her a court-ordered treatment plan. Not a cell. Not a locked ward. A treatment plan. She had a court review scheduled for June 2026. A three-year-old's face got there first.
Here's the part that should make you physically sick: A judge reviewed her case and concluded she continued to suffer from serious mental illness and posed a danger to herself and others — and then let her out into the community anyway.
Read that again: A judge looked a documented, violent, armed, mentally ill woman in the eye, wrote down "danger to others" in the court record, and then opened the door. The child in that Walmart paid for that decision.
This isn't an isolated failure. This is a pattern, and it plays out over and over again across this country. A few examples:
In 2013, in Hillsborough County, Florida, 27-year-old Mario Camacho attacked his sister, then barricaded himself in a bedroom with his seven-year-old brother and a knife. Deputies responded. Camacho refused repeated commands to drop the weapon. A deputy ended it.
In Oklahoma, Sammie Wallace — 37 years old — walked into a store, ripped a two-year-old girl out of a shopping cart, and pressed a knife to her throat. Cops spent thirty minutes trying to talk him down. Wallace responded by escalating. One bullet resolved what thirty minutes of patience could not.
In Phoenix, just last September, officers responded to a text-to-911 domestic violence call and looked through an open front door to find a man, one Wilson Melgar-Melgar, holding a toddler in his lap with a machete in his hand. Short version, in this case, was that Melgar-Melgar survived being shot by the cops and the kid was uninjured.
As Glenn Reynolds has noted, documenting every such case would require a much bigger page. But in nearly every one of these situations — the knives, the children, the public spaces, the standoffs — investigators find the same thing buried in the background: a documented, years-long history of severe untreated or under-treated mental illness. Schizophrenia. Psychosis. A revolving door that spins faster and faster until it launches someone into a Walmart with a knife.
The pattern is always the same:
The Revolving Door: Authorities arrest the individual or hold them involuntarily. Staff stabilize them. Someone releases them. The cycle restarts. Following landmark Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s, the law dictates that you cannot hold someone against their will unless they pose an imminent, demonstrable danger to themselves or others at that exact moment.
The Collapse of Outpatient Care: Those liberty protections make it nearly impossible to force someone to keep taking antipsychotic medication once they're back in the community. They stop. The paranoia returns. The danger returns with it. A person can be picked up by police during a psychiatric crisis, placed on a brief emergency hold (usually 72 hours), and given medication. Once they stabilize on that medication inside the hospital, they no longer meet the legal definition of "imminent danger." The hospital is legally required to discharge them, often with just a prescription and a referral for outpatient care. Of course, there’s no way for the rest of us to know this, and no way to enforce their actually staying on that medication unless and until there’s another violent incident. The system is forced to assume that the person in question is maintaining his or her own treatment correctly until another immediate threat comes up.
The Inevitable Escalation: Family members beg for help and find their hands legally tied. The law demands "imminent danger" before anyone can intervene — and by the time that threshold arrives, it arrives in a store, or a park, or a living room, with a blade already out.
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The system doesn't just fail on this point. The system designs this outcome, and then buries it in paperwork, and then holds press conferences about resources and reviews and treatment plans while children get their faces cut open. And those are only the documented cases. How many incidents never made it to a report?
Look, I admit there are no easy answers here. The 1970s rulings that created the "imminent danger" standard weren't handed down in a vacuum. They were a direct response to catastrophic abuses — states were committing people for being inconvenient to their families, for being poor, for being politically dissident. The institutions themselves were frequently brutal. The reformers who pushed for strict commitment standards had real grievances.
However, looking at the cases I’ve cited, I don’t think anyone would disagree that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. The result of the existing laws is a legal framework that functionally protects the institutions' paperwork more than it protects the public — or, critically, the mentally ill person herself, who often suffers enormously before the "imminent danger" moment arrives, a moment they often don’t survive. Imagine trying to explain all of these legalities to the three-year-old and his family.
Maybe it’s time to understand that protecting the most severely mentally ill from their own illness is not the same thing as "oppressing" them. Sometimes, the most humane thing a society can do is refuse to let someone destroy herself and take innocent people with her.
We know how to do better. We are simply declining to.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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