Nearly every mass shooting in recent history was performed by people on mind-altering drugs.
Gun control? We need medication control! Newton elementary school shooter Adam Lanza likely on meds
In mass shootings involving guns and mind-altering medications, politicians immediately seek to blame guns but never the medication. Nearly every mass shooting that has taken place in America over the last two decades has a link to psychiatric medication, and it appears today’s tragic event is headed in the same direction.
According to ABC News, Adam Lanza, the alleged shooter, has been labeled as having “mental illness” and a “personality disorder.” These are precisely the words typically heard in a person who is being “treated” with mind-altering psychiatric drugs.
One of the most common side effects of psychiatric drugs is violent outbursts and thoughts of suicide.
The Columbine High School shooters were, of course, on psychiatric drugs at the time they shot their classmates in 1999. Suicidal tendencies and violent, destructive thoughts are some of the admitted behavioral side effects of mind-altering prescription medications.
No gun can, by itself, shoot anyone. It must be triggered by a person who makes a decision to use it. And while people like NY Mayor Bloomberg are predictably trying to exploit the deaths of these children to call for guns to be stripped from all law abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong whatsoever, nobody calls for medication control.
Why is that? After all, medication alters the mind that controls the finger that pulls the trigger. The saying that “guns kill people” is physically impossible. People kill other people, and as we all learned from watching the O.J. Simpson trial, you don’t need a gun to commit murder.
We should be outlawing psychiatric medications, not an inanimate piece of metal
We are seeing the idiocy and evil accelerate to alarming levels as God is pushed farther and farther from involvement in the everyday life of the average person. If you take out the one factor that has the most postive influence on personal behavior what do you suppose is going to fill the resulting void ? The improper use of legal drugs is close to epidemic in this country and the use of antideppressents to help people cope with regular life is now accepted as normal .
uh gee, I seem to remember I pointed out a week or so back, when you were going troppo over legal dope, that LEGAL drugs kill more people every year then illegal ones and that included suicide and murders while using the SSRI and others..
and then add the fact the dsm update 5 now makes just about every human emotion an illness thereby opening the poor gullible people seeing the psych docs targets.
add recent manufactured planned “shortages” of risperidal etc designed to push prices up.
and plenty of docs happy to dose kids as young as TWO years old with said meds.
teachers who see any bright fidgety bored kid as ADD or hyper and needing meds
parents who didnt put the time in to educate and control their kids pack em off to childcre at 3 mths old etc who cant be Fd to spend the time then wanting well behave biddable kids via a pill..
you really think that the flickering TV all day and games etc dont affect a tiny tots vision mind and behaviour? short attention spans trained IN by jump cut flash flash media? sound bites mini info segments.. and dumbed down/ instant fix/ life perfect in tv land media.. people who cant speak fluently, spell ,or manage to get along in friendly co worker areas.
personally while the us govt has a war on drugs,- and thats a huge laugh!
its a great way to confine the poor unemployed and outcast to jails for profit and the appearance of employment for private rambos like G4s and wakenhut and XE or whatever name they are using this week.,for ever more heavyhanded jackbooted thuggery called policing.- a criminal record for a baggie? means a lifetime of inability to ever get a decent job?
well thats a smart way to alienate and ensure poverty and continued social misfits if ever there was one.
while forcing kids on this crap they simply arent able to be taken as serious., any poor sod that some social worker says isnt behaving as they??? think appropriate is a candidtate for control..
hell lets ask WHY? the autism etc rates are now something like 1 in 88 kids up from 1 in many hundreds a few decades back?
and deny vaccines could possibly harm?? to the volume of around 40+ and rising everytome a pharma develops one before a kids brain is even forming a blood brain barrier ie at birth for Hep B. sure some…not many removed mercury, but aluminium and a pile of soap and pig kidney tissues and whatever other muck they use is IN the kids blood and entire body..
but thats ok too?
when evidence says the recent whooping cough measles and chickenpox outbreaks were IN immunised population of over 80%
herd immunity? my ass!
until the sheepies wake the F Up and stop and think and LOOK at the data and evidence and side effects listed and consider wether the cure is WORSE than the so called disease..youre stuffed.
gee just like global warming isnt it?
a pile of so called experts and media morons, filling the dumbed down obediently panicking fools minds with fear and hype and lies.and Faked data, adjusted to suit their goals NOT the truth
I’m against all drugs, and don’t appreciate straw man arguments.
huh straw what?
oz – Autism rates went up exponentially after thimerosal was removed from all routine childhood vaccines. It is still present in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccine. I would never blame removing mercury from vaccines as causing the increase in autism (the increase is due to increased diagnosis; we don’t just call such patients “mentally retarded” as we did decades ago). We are finding more and more genetic causes of autism and related developmental disorders – the phenotype just gets expressed at a young age and therefore is associated with vaccines due to timing. Furthermore, Wakefield’s “research” on the MMR-autism link was found to be fraudulent and was retracted, but not before feeding an anti-vaccine movement that has resulted in a spike in deaths from vaccine-preventable infectious illness.
That said, I oppose hep B and HPV vaccinations being mandatory for school entry. Assuming they are not having sex in schools, they won’t be passing these illnesses to other kids. I do agree with mandating vaccines for infections that are passed via the respiratory route (e.g. measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, H. influenzae, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, meningitis).
John, a question for you re advocating the Chicken Pox vaccine. Aren’t you concerned about the deterioration of societal resistance to the disease? Prior to the vaccine, a typical child would get chicken pox, feel a little ill for a bit and then have a life long immunity to the disease. For the overwhelming portion of society, chicken pox wasn’t a serious disease.
We absolutely know that the alleged “life long vaccines” are never life long. We thought the MMR was good for life….. oops, it isn’t. We thought the Hep B series was good for life…. oops not really. What is going to happen when these children lose their immunity and then catch chicken pox much later as adults?
I’m pretty sure the evidence points to naturally acquired immunity as being much more effective than manufactured immunity. We also know that when we introduce certain vaccines, there is a propensity of the diseases to mutate into something that combats the immunity. I think we’re doing more harm than good with the chicken pox vaccine.
Yes, I am concerned about waning immunity http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa064040#t=article, and there is the potential to shift disease burden to adults who generally get more severe cases. This can be countered with booster vaccines, however.
The Varivax vaccine has reduced deaths from chicken pox by over half.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa042271#t=article
Vaccines do not cause organisms to mutate faster. You could, in fact, argue that fewer infected people give the virus fewer chances to mutate. Vaccines do not select for resistant organisms in the manner that antibiotics can select for resistant bacteria (and to be clear, antibiotics do not increase the rate of mutation, they just select for bacteria that already possess mutations that confer resistence).
If we get enough herd immunity to chicken pox, we can potentially eliminate it in this country as we did polio (varicella has no natural reservoir besides humans to my knowledge).
So, regarding the chicken pox vaccine specifically, it so far has caused more good than harm. The medical profession will continue to watch it closely.
Very few things in medicine (or life in general) is black or white. There is a lot of gray.
John, thanks for the response. Clearly, it’s way too early to tell if we have had a success or not with the chicken pox vaccine. Yes, a lot of gray. Moving to the gray seems to contradict the edict of “first, do no harm”.
On this topic of chicken pox vaccine, I used to be against it. So, over the years I see more white than gray as more data have come out. Remember, it is possible we could yet eliminate chicken pox as we did smallpox (worldwide) and polio (in this country).
If we expanded the discussion to other vaccines, it would be different
Geez. The author of the psych med article in the link confuses association with causation, much as our climate alarmists do. There is a time and place for psych meds. They are not happy pills. They generally are prescribed when perceived risks outweigh the benefits. Decades ago before meds existed, lots of people were institutionalized. At least now some of these lives can be salvaged. The mental health system in this country still has many cracks in it, and both political parties are to blame (e.g. Obamacare cut funding for inpatient psych).
If someone under (psychiatric) care does something illegal or immoral, the doctor is responsible for it. Thus whoever prescribed his medications or oversaw his treatment should be on trial for murder. If you can’t actually treat the people with your methods, you shouldn’t be trying: blindly fucking around with people’s brain chemistry is in no way the same as attempting to save someone from cancer or kidney failure.
I disagree, as would the vast majority of the medical and legal community. Plus, we barely have all the facts at this early stage.
I’m not a psychiatrist, just a retired PCP.
I’m not defending all drugs and all prescriptions for such, just that there is a role for them in patients evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and there is always a risk-benefit estimation to be made.
To help reduce the risk of future such tragedies, we need to strengthen the mental health system, not weaken it.
While we do not yet have the full story behind this murderer (who has been reported by non-medical personnel as being autistic and with a personality disorder), we do know in general a lot of psychotic illness presents in young (teens, 20s) males. The severity of the illnesses runs the gamut from highly functional to sociopathic. Of the millions of patients with such illnesses, only a small fraction commit such a heinous act that it makes the news.
I will admit that when reading the list of people that commit this type of activity, the association of the meds taken and actions performed were striking. However, that does not justify a causal link between them no more than hockey causes cold weather. What is very constant in all of these attacks is that the perpetrator commits suicide. We see this in many murder suicides involving domestic issues and in many mass causality atrocities.
When we look historically at these types of incidents these perpetrators seem to “Have nothing to lose” and go into the activity with the intention of do and or die. They seem very desperate and their actions just an extension of that desperation. A person who has something to live for does not embrace their own destruction. These people however have lost empathy for their fellow humans and all value for their own lives. Maybe the common thread is not the medications they took, but their psychological state, level of self esteem, personal identity, and connection to society at large. While psychotropic medications have side effects, and some are significant, they tell only part of a much more complicated story.
Well, of course the medical & legal community would prefer to have no personal responsibility for their actions. But I tell you if you agree to great someone for some psychic condition, you agree to take responsibility for the outcome of that treatment; or you admit your “science” is as much of a failure as astrology & (more importantly) you stop trying to muddle around inside people’s brains.
& that’s patent bullshit. If someone don’t have a physical injury or some equivalent chemical imapirment, they don’t have a “mental illness”: they’re evil. If there’s one thing last 100+ years of the psychological (& psychiatric) sciences has taught us, it’s that the mental health profession is full of people trying to make terrible excuses for evil behaviour, or worse trying to deny the very existence of evil. You start holding them personally responsible for their failures & I guarantee the “science” will suddenly decide that “hey, I guess some people just need to be dealt with, not treated”.
There are many excellent books criticizing psychiatric drug use. The best introduction to a critical history of psychiatry are two recent books by Thomas Szasz of the Cato Institute:
Psychiatry: The Science of Lies
Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry
Modern psychiatric drugs are crude. Our understanding of the mind, like the climate system, is in its infancy. These drugs aren’t prescribed lightly and have significant unpleasant side effects. (Loss of libido, interruptions to mood and concentration, etc.) They are usually prescribed when a person can’t function normally without them or there is a perceived risk to others or self harm, such as suicide.
Is it possible that certain drugs could trigger a violent response in certain individuals? Yes. Can we determine probabilities in individual cases? No. Can we run a study that will weigh the costs versus the benefits? Probably not. (Very small sample size, issues over ethical considerations for such a study.)
Here is the ethical dilemma: Hypothetically let’s say 1 in 10000 individuals on these medications goes crazy and kills other people… Let’s say suicides increase by 5% if they are denied these drugs. What to do?
Agree.
Should we ban psych meds, or let physicians and patients weigh risks and benefits?
Bupropion doesn’t cause weight gain or diminish libido. SSRIs do. Atypical antipsychotics (e.g. Zyprexa, Seroquel) seem to cause a lot of weight gain, worsening cholesterol profiles, and higher blood sugars.
One should not base their opinions of psych meds on cases that are worthy enough to make the news. Correlation doesn’t prove causation.
I’m all for keeping patients off meds. If a diabetic is on 3 meds to control blood sugars, I’m happy if they can lose weight and get off a med or two. If a patient with high blood pressure eats less salt and can reduce medications, then great. If a person with psych illness can solve their issues with therapy alone, great. Some of this can be solved by people taking more personal responsibility. In my experience, the people with psychotic (e.g. schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder) and personality disorders are generally unable to be treated without medications.
And keep in mind that the severity of these illnesses runs the gamut – there are high-functioning people in society with mild sx, but also sociopathic and institutionalized people with severe sx, and people in between. Detecting people before they commit mass murder is difficult. And for whatever reason, it is more difficult to involuntarily hospitalize the severely mentally ill, or coerce them into compliance with medications.
thing is the pharmas now have had to put warning re suicidal tendencies caused BY their meds ON the info sheets, in very very tiny print..
the volume of patients suiciding or committing crimes murders while taking made that so.
they fought it as they always do.
Ive mentioned before I have had 3 friends die/ 2 suicided, while on or trying to reduce dosages of ssris, and one having seizures and being told to up the dose when first syjmptoms appeared then denial it was the meds and diagnosing epilepsy, with ensuing inappropriate meds.
smart girl ditched both, all epilepsy etc vanished too..
re vaccines, polios soil/water borne and hygeine imporovements and sewers were probably a better Cure than the vaccines especially for us olders who are now risking SV40. thanks TO the vax.
and the 48,ooo kids in india that got polio AFTER they got the vaccine? proven the strain IN the vax NOT wild.
ditto same story elsewhere year after year.
when we dose our kids with masses of vaccines, conting a lot of gentic material inc pig cells etc then whos to say that isnt affecting mental acuity and development either? as well as alumiium and adjuvants?
no ones EVER actually done any tests.
if they do and find damage would they publish?
I dount it.
and usa has laws protecting vaccine makers- especially- from any lawsuits due to proven harm? amazing isnt it. especially after repeated Gullain Barre incidents.
then the insane mandated forced HPV. merk admit and know that UNtested prior HPV carriers actually have 40+% INcrease of cancer if given vaccine, it IN the literature. but NO test are done before vaccinating?
why not?
and ps Wakefield didnt fake it and was cleared BUT the media dont publish that small but vita;l info., not when the dude pushing it in the uk paper was related to a vaccine maker company/profit..
other funny thing?
I had measles and chickenpox when young, schools then insisted on vax anyway, got mumps and whooping cough jabs too, , then got juvenile arthritis flare in the following week, we didnt know re autoimmune issues back then.
I also managed to get mumps and whooping cough later anyway.
would I vaccinate a child?
NO
my pets? NO not after a tetanus jab to a pup caused blindness and neuro damage within two weeks in a perfectly healthy pup before the vax.
We in the U.S. should certainly learn from what works in other countries, yet craft laws and take measures that preserve the right for self-defense.
However, Pandora’s box was opened long ago, and any solution would have to take into account that we already have several hundred million guns in this country, and any laws passed will not be followed by criminals or mentally ill. What do you do with the guns already in society?
The etiology of gun crimes is multifactorial, whether they be due to the mentally-ill mass killer, gang-banger, or the random non-mass killing where the victim often knows the attacker.
To even have a reasonable discussion of this issue, we must first define the problems and subproblems, and reframe the discussion away from simplistic vague “gun control” which does not work and instead focus on public safety. We also need to acknowledge that there is no “one size fits all,” or even any solution that can “cure” the problem, only mitigate risks. I think we can work this problem in bipartisan fashion.
The rare mass-shooting (5 or more victims): You have your right to bear arms and carry concealed weapons, but do you really need a rapidly-firing gun that sprays out a lot of bullets (i.e. large gun clips) for self-defense? You don’t get to possess a surface-to-air missile or other military-grade weapons. Govt does have the power to regulate. State and local govts can, e.g. permit automatic weapons and large clips on gun ranges or private lands (when was the last time you heard of a right-wing militia carrying out a mass shooting?). The perpetrators of these mass school shootings are predominantly young men (an age where we see the onset of psychotic illness). We can divert funding from the prison system (where IMO we should incarcerate violent offenders and just fine the drug-related offenses) into mental health. I’d love to have therapists regularly interview students, and be able to help, and yet also help screen for the person who is developing schizophrenia or comparable illness and get them into the system better than they do now. We also should swing back the pendulum to be able to involuntarily hospitalize people who present a risk to the community or themselves (not back to pre-chlorpromazine days, but in that direction). We should also be willing to spend a little tax money on secure locked school doors and possibly even arm school officials or hire security or police). The killer in CT defeated the locked door security measure, but the physical barrier is a risk mitigator. Had the principal or staff been armed, the killer wouldn’t have made it past the front door.
What does our culture teach kids through violent video games and movies? How does this affect the growing developing brain? Does it hard-wire a desensitization to violence and lack of empathy for others? What to do about this problem?
Gang shootings: This is a problem in cities primarily. The problem is due to breakdown of the family, generational welfare, cyclic poverty, etc. How about some enterprise zones to increase economic opportunity? Mental health system can get involved (funded by saving money from not imprisoning minor drug crimes). Encouraging personal responsibility, and teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish will help. I also like New York City’s “stop and frisk” policies and credit them for reducing murders; we can and should have a debate about “unreasonable search and seizure,” yet cannot ignore that this policy has improved peoples’ right to safety. These ideas can be expanded upon – I don’t have all the answers, but I do know the current system is failing miserably.
Shootings where the victim knows the killer, isolated shootings: Strengthen mental health services. Rx addictions. Concealed carry. Can’t guarantee criminals will be compliant with ANY law, but at least can train law-abiding persons about gun safety and how to self-defend, and license them.
Terrorist shootings, e.g. Ft. Hood.: Treat them as terrorism (violence done to advance a political/religious cause), not workplace violence. Stop political correctness. Further discussion beyond the scope of my comment and knowledge base.
Keep in mind that any laws that criminals don’t follow will not be very effective. Only law-abiding citizens would purchase mandatory gun insurance. Same reason why complete gun bans are ineffective (look at Chicago). A law on paper is worthless if it is impractical. Restricting the sale of automatic/semi-automatic weapons and large gun clips would at least reduce the number of new weapons in society and the damage one gun can do.
We also need to see what works in other countries (e.g. Switzerland, U.K., Canada, Germany, Israel) and see if anything can be applied here either practically or constitutionally. We are a unique multiracial culture with a different set of values – Japan’s system won’t work here at all.
I think we are capable of having an informed bipartisan discussion about guns and violence in general, and put in some cost-neutral measures that are effective yet also not infringe on the 2nd Amendment. We have to admit there are many different problems that have not been solved by the current system. We will never reduce risk to zero, but we can mitigate risks, and effective measures must not be “one size fits all” nor be expensive. We need to reframe the debate away from standard stale talking points, defending what doesn’t work, defending the status quo, dueling stats, and finger-pointing to one of problem-solving. This is a difficult problem with many facets and subproblems.
John B – what you say requires a government that does not want a simple “one-size-fits-all” answer. Socialists etc like the population disarmed, so that is exactly what they will try and do. They are not interested in actual “fixes”.
“any solution would have to take into account that we already have several hundred million guns in this country”
I think that any solution would have to take into account that we already have been using very dangerous psychiatric drugs for “diseases” proclaimed by psychiatry without ever demonstrating them by the scientific method.
See: Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz