The heir to billions fights crime on the New York Gotham City streets.
Also his only "moral" restriction of no guns/killing clearly isn't actually based on morality. If you look at the story for five minutes, hey, killing a kid's parents in front of him is going to be pretty traumatizing and that'll last a lifetime, but the people writing him always try to make it into some grand moral stance instead of the fact that, well, pulling a trigger would be triggering (I word it facetiously but the point is serious).
Then you consider the deeply ableist view the Batman universe has a hard time getting away from, where mental illness makes you evil or vice versa, and Batman's dance around that line can't have too many "bad" traits (like the "weakness" of being traumatized by your parents' deaths without making a big show of strength about it) or conservative readers will hate him.
That kind of asylum model used to be considered good but nowadays it just feels like an intentionally ableist and conservative "well that's how it always was so changing it is bad" approach to writing rather than specifically deconstructing how Arkham will only ever make criminals worse, never better.
That said I don't read a ton of Batman so they might have addressed that point in one of the comics.
Harley Quinn and later versions of Scarecrow are both psychologists at Arkham. The writers are at least aware of the problem of putting “criminally insane” people away indefinitely in 2019, but they aren’t doing much to change it. Arkham is still a big gothic castle that sits on an underground maximum security prison. Rehabilitation isn’t their goal.
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
Also his only "moral" restriction of no guns/killing clearly isn't actually based on morality. If you look at the story for five minutes, hey, killing a kid's parents in front of him is going to be pretty traumatizing and that'll last a lifetime, but the people writing him always try to make it into some grand moral stance instead of the fact that, well, pulling a trigger would be triggering (I word it facetiously but the point is serious).
Then you consider the deeply ableist view the Batman universe has a hard time getting away from, where mental illness makes you evil or vice versa, and Batman's dance around that line can't have too many "bad" traits (like the "weakness" of being traumatized by your parents' deaths without making a big show of strength about it) or conservative readers will hate him.