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Twenty-nine years ago today I was in a hospital bed nursing my 1-day-old son when a TV reporter announced John Lennon was murdered by an insane fan. The joy and hope of the happiest event of my life, the birth of my first child, was forever and irrevocably tinged with the brutal loss of this gentle voice for peace.

I fervently hoped my son would grow up in a world where such a thing would never be allowed to happen again.

But this morning I found myself putting blue lights in the windows of the news office to honor four Lakewood police officers assassinated by a madman.

Their funeral is today. I wonder, will the violence ever end?

Events like these, and our own Alger tragedy, trigger a barrage of intense emotions, anger high among them. While that fury is rightfully aimed at the perpetrators, shouldn’t some rage should be aimed at a society that looks away from persons with mental illness until they do something so horrendous that we can’t look at anything else?

Those who are hurt the worst want the person who destroyed their lives to suffer as they do. I know. I’ve been there. But it isn’t enough.

A man raped and murdered my 14-year-old friend Shawn Hoefer and her friend Lorie Woodruff and left them to be found by dogs in the desert in 1973. I don’t like to use the name of him or other killers when I can avoid it, believing that doing so somehow glorifies them.

Shawn’s killer was convicted, but the death penalty was declared illegal at that time and his sentence commuted to life with possibility of parole. Scary, believe me.

After a few years, he killed someone in prison and got a well-deserved death sentence.

For a quarter-century he played the system for all it was worth. He came within hours of execution three or four times, each time enjoying a “last meal” before making an 11th-hour appeal. Once, he announced his Christmas gift to Nevada would be to let his execution proceed. I bet he had a really great meal that year.

I can tell you that waiting for an execution in America is an excruciating experience. Personally, I think I would have let it go sooner if the scum had gotten life without parole. But no matter what, my life was forever changed, my youthful sense of security stripped away.

My nightmare died of colon cancer at Nevada State Prison. I’m not cruel by nature, more of a bleeding-heart liberal, but I did find his death infinitely satisfying.

But Shawn’s killer was not insane, at least in a diagnosable sense. Which brings me back to my main point.

Lennon’s assassin, the Alger mass murderer, the Lakewood executioner all screamed their craziness from rooftops before they killed good, innocent people. Until then, society tried to ignore them. There are precious few resources to deal with such people until they commit a crime. Even then, just try keeping them confined for any length of time, no matter what threat they pose. Jails are stuffed, budgets are slashed. Scary people are set loose on the streets.

Why can’t we intervene to give them treatment before they need punishment? It’s not coddling to provide — even require — humane medical care. It’s better for them and certainly would have been better for the families whose lives they ruined. Once an atrocity is committed, victims have few palatable options beyond vengeance.

We let it pass when people with severe mental illness refuse treatment and medication. We have a vague queasiness about violating their civil rights, freedom, autonomy. We pretend it’s their personal choice to live in Seattle gutters or Alger woods and wander around arguing with voices in their heads.

Puh-leese. If I lose my faculties and become a danger to myself and others, I beg you — put me in a straight jacket in a warm, dry place and force feed me meds, even as I’m screaming at you that’s not what I want. It won’t look pretty, but it’s humane.

It’s easy to leave disturbed people to their own devices. The hard thing would be to build and staff caring facilities for them. We cringe at the idea of involuntary commitment. No one wants to be chained up in a Dickensian Bedlam, or lobotomized like Frances Farmer, or put at the mercy of Nurse Ratched.

But there must be a humane middle ground somewhere between the excesses of the past and the careless indifference of today.

The cost of such a system is high, but much of it would be offset by savings to the legal and penal system, which are flooded with mentally ill people. Unfortunately we can never compute the economic benefits spurred by preventative medicine, education and mental health care.

If you don’t think it’s worth the expense, just try to imagine a world in which we didn’t know the immeasurable cost of the Alger and Lakewood tragedies, and the murder of John Lennon.