It clearly is not the case in matters of public policy, where a strong advocacy approach blinds us to other options. In the Miranda case, conservatives argue that the requirement to throw out voluntary confessions, if the suspects have not been read their rights, allows killers to walk free because of a technicality. Liberals maintain that unless Miranda is strictly adhered to, the police will wring confessions from innocent people. And, when it is determined that a technicality and not coercion led to the confession, a note might be placed in the police officer's personnel file. In this way, any repetition of questionable actions would stand out when evaluating future confessions.
Most state laws ban the disclosure of mental patients' records in order to protect their privacy.
At the same time, a study of recent serial killings and shootings at workplaces shows that about half of them are committed by people who have been previously institutionalized and who had exhibited violent tendencies-hence, the request of public authorities to include mental patients' records in the databank. An intermediate position would include the names of mental patients in the databank but without their records or any indication of why they are included. They would simply be coded together with, say, those underage and those who committed minor crimes as not suitable for gun ownership at this time. In these and many other situations, intermediate positions come to mind, once one is willing to dump both extreme opposite positions, once one is inclined to look for common ground that may allow meeting the concerns of both sides. It is time to recognize that extremism in the defense of virtue is a vice.