More Mentals

Besides Rahm's cuts to mental health clinics, you can lay this one at the feet of former aldercreature Helen Schiller for welcoming every halfway house and mental disorder storage facility into her ward for years upon years:

• It’s dangerous being a hands-on Chicago alderman who walks the streets of his ward and is not afraid to get his hands dirty. Rookie Ald. James Cappleman (46th) is living proof.

  Two months after being shoved and pelted with bread crumbs by an Uptown woman known as the “Pigeon Lady,” Cappleman is pressing charges once again — this time against a woman he claims ran after him with a knife.

  It happened at 6 p.m. last Friday at Broadway and Montrose. He said he was calling police after he saw the woman sitting on the sidewalk drinking a can of beer when she came after him. He said he didn’t see the knife, but he had no doubt his life was in danger.

  “She reached into her blouse and was chasing me. . . . Two witnesses told me, ‘She has a knife. You’d better run’ — and I did,” he said. “What went through my mind was, ‘I don’t want to get stabbed and killed over some stupid thing like this, over someone drinking in the public way. That’s not the way I want to die.’ ”

Gee aldercreature, people have died for a lot less.

But it kind of makes you wish you were allowed to carry a gun, doesn't it? Oh wait, you are authorized to carry a firearm by ordinance. You just choose not to. Not the sharpest pencils over there in the 46th Ward evidently.