Drug Connections to Mass Shootings

Although the recent school shooting is blanketing the news, everyone is avoiding the question as to WHY these mass shootings occur when the answer might be all too obvious. It is too easy for lazy minds to blame it on guns, as if guns walked to the schools and malls and pulled their own triggers. Maybe there is a common link we don’t want to see.

Drugs for anxiety and mental challenges carry the warning that they may cause harmful and suicidal thoughts, so why don’t we see the possible connection? Kids are placed on drugs in their preteens and grow up dependent on them and their altered thinking seems normal to them. Not everyone on these drugs is off the chart like these people are who choose to murder, but it is a common denominator among them that news outlets refuse to consider or even talk about.

After all, almost every commercial break carries an ad for one drug or another. A drug company pulling their ads would cost them big and the bottom line is more important than any safety issue to them.

I quickly and plainly make no assertion that everyone on such drugs are potential killers for that would be ludicrous. Most people benefit greatly from their help and they enable them to live healthy and functional lives when otherwise they would be challenged daily due to the effects of depression and anxiety. Most of our investigations and questioning, however, happens to be conducted after the fact and there does seems to be a link, albeit ignored by many.

In June 2014, Aaron Ybarra, killed one student and wounded two others with a shotgun at the Seattle Pacific University. His plan was to kill as many people as possible and then kill himself. Two years before, Ybarra admitted that he had been prescribed the antidepressant Prozac and antipsychotic Risperdal. His counselor said that he was taking Prozac.

In Austin, Texas in August 1966, Charles Whitman shot 16 people from a university tower while on amphetamines and barbiturates.  In March of 1981, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. He was on Valium at the time. William Cruse killed 6 people in 1987 while on psychiatric drugs.

Jeffery Dahmer killed and dismembered 17 people while on tranquilizers and anti-depressants in 1991. In 1997, Jeremy Strohmeyer was charged with the rape and murder of a seven-year old girl while on Dexerdrine, known to cause hallucinations, confusion, anxiety and violent behavior and mood swings.

In the famous shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, where 32 were killed, prescription drugs “related to the treatment of psychological problems” were found by investigators among the shooter’s effects.   

In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children while under the influence of Effexor and Remeron, known to cause thoughts of suicide in young people as well as impulsive, irritable, agitated, hostile, aggressive, restless, hyperactive (mentally or physically) behavior, and the possibility of becoming even more depressed. The list goes on and includes the most recent shootings as well.

According to British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a founder of RxISK.org, an independent website for researching and reporting on prescription drugs, 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade have been linked to a widely prescribed type of antidepressant called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs.

There is no question that the mind-altering drugs influence behavior and therefore they carry warnings of “suicidal thoughts and feelings of violent behavior.” 8.7 million Americans contemplate suicide each year and 1.1 million actually act on those thoughts.

253 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled every year in the United States, the second most prescribed drug in America, second only to cholesterol-lowering drugs.

An alarming fact is that a study in 2010 found that effectiveness of antidepressant drugs to be “minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.” Yet, there is ample evidence on the other hand that such behavior-altering drugs “intensify violent thoughts and behaviors, both suicidal and homicidal, especially among children.”

So, is there a connection between these mass shootings and violent behavior we have seen in recent years? It appears a very distinct possibility. Personally, I think the pharmaceutical companies, or politicians whose pockets are lined with campaign donations by them, are reluctant to make that connection because it is a multi-billion-dollar industry and as we all know, money talks.

The next time you hear some politician giving lip-service to “protecting our children” especially after a school shooting, as they always do, ask yourself where their main priority is, safety of our children, or winning their next campaign and getting rich with donations and contributions?

In fact, the next time you have the opportunity to question one, ask them yourself.

Hypocrisy and Gun Control Go Hand in Hand

 

Few things bring out the Liberal ire than the mention of the Second Amendment and the Constitutional Right of Americans to own guns. Immediately after their mouth starts to water, the lies, misconceptions and myths start to fly.

An ad depicting the fact that the Obama children are protected by guns all day but that he does little to protect the rest of the nations kids, has been seen as both on-target and vile, depending upon your point of view. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman thought it was unfair to bring the president's kids into a political issue.

The hypocrisy of this administration not to be neglected, Obama himself signs his new gun control demands with four hand-picked children watching on. Maybe Carney failed to give President Obama the memo. Does our president even think of children when he is not pushing an agenda?

As Senator, Barack Obama was the only person with the callousness to actually take the floor and voice his opposition to a bill that would have demanded life support for babies born alive from a botched abortion. Let him use those kids as a backdrop for his disingenuous "protecting the most vulnerable among us" campaign.

No one argues that protecting the children of America must be a top priority but Obama saying it doesn't make it his priority.

During the 2008 campaign he was questioned by Pastor Rick Warrens about his stand on human trafficking, the third largest criminal industry in the world, which often targets young people for the sex trade. Then Senator Obama said, "This has to be a top priority". One solution of his was to be tougher with penalties on those caught.

This is an industry that brings in over 32 billion dollars annually, and enslaves 27 million people of all ages, thousands in the United States. However, when was the last time he stood behind his bully-pulpit and went after those who profit from their innocence? Who champions their cause? Not President Obama in spite of his saying the right words and expressing the right sentiment at public debates when seeking votes. Little has been done to expose the problem by Washington, much less address it.

But when it comes to gun control, an issue that he, both as a Senator and a President, holds close to his heart, President Obama doesn't mind using the bodies of children to make him stand a little taller to get his message heard. No, Jay Carney, that is abuse of children. I thought only Hamas used children as human shields.

Obama believes that to frame the gun control issue as a children's health or protection issue, he will keep opponents from attacking his efforts to negate the Constitutional Right to keep and bear arms. To stand upon your Second Amendment rights, and to demand its protection, he wants you to believe, is to not care about children. Those four students from Newtown, CT were on stage with Obama during his ceremonious signing of orders for one reason, to shield him from criticism.

School shootings are the most horrific events that take place in our world. There can be no mistake about that. But one of the reasons that schools, churches, and malls are chosen by mass murderers as killing fields is because they know they'll find more helpless victims there. Curiously, they never choose a gun show or a cop bar to target. Unarmed victims are the order of the day and what better place to find them than at "No-Gun Zones"?

The misrepresentation of gun violence is promoted by the media in their lack of reporting of incidents where guns were used to actually stop crimes. These cases do not fit their anti-gun agenda, especially in larger cities.

Jacob Tyler Roberts, who shot up the Clackamas Mall in Oregon, stopped his rampage only after he saw a man had him in his sights. His next shot took his own life. Another gun on the scene, even without being fired, put a stop to the killing. Guns do this every day but it isn't reported because it would strengthen the need for more guns, not less, in our culture. So the myths prevail, to our own detriment.

Reporters hiding the truth because it doesn't promote your own brand of facts used to be called "yellow journalism". Now it is business as usual.

While everyone remembers Columbine or Virginia Tech because of the shootings there, few have ever heard of Pearl High School in Mississippi or Edinboro, Pennsylvania. In these two shootings, armed citizens put an end to the rampage but that story didn't make it to the newspapers, much less the TV networks.

These two incidents had the lowest number of victims among mass shooting in recent history simply because the shooter was not the only one with a gun. In these cases armed citizens had the situation under control before the police arrived, which wasn't for 4 1/2 minutes at Pearl High School and a full 11 minutes in Edinboro.

Since 1995 people carrying a weapon have not been allowed within a 1,000 feet of a school but that hasn't prevent armed thugs from carrying out their mayhem. In fact, no law has and cannot stop someone with such evil on their minds. If they could, signs posted on doors would have stopped all such crimes. It isn't that criminals can't read. It is that they don't care.

There have been no studies that show laws deter gun crimes, but in more cases than we are told, other guns do. The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. A repeatedly proven fact.

Gun owners are being demonized in America today as if law-abiding gun owners are behind the terrible acts of violence even though gun and headline-grabbing politicians know that isn't true. Adam Lanza in his shooting of kids and teachers in Newtown, CT, broke 41 laws that day. Laws such as the theft of weapons, transporting them, carrying them into the school, as well as using them on others, existed on the books but did not deter him in committing his insane act.

Diane Feinsten, Senator from California, has proposed reinstating the "Assault Weapons Ban" President Bill Clinton imposed and George W. Bush reversed, though it has not been shown to stop their use in crimes. It was interestingly in effect during the time of the Columbine shooting and did not prevent it. Feinstein herself, not only at one time defended the right of a person to arm his/herself for protection, has for years had a concealed carry permit with "unrestricted pistol" provisions. Hypocrisy in Washington is appalling.

America may have a gun violence problem but it appears Obamaland certainly does. Sixty percent of all gun violence comes from major cities that voted for Obama's style of gun control. The cities with the strictest gun regulations seem to have the highest gun crime rates with Chicago and Washington DC being the worst in America.

Contrarily, cities like Kennesaw, Georgia, where in 1982 by city ordinance, every household was required to have a firearm, tell a different story. Since that bold move, which caused opponents to proclaim there would be gun fights in the streets, which never materialized, crime has fallen 89% while the rest of the state has seen a mere 10% drop.

This is the story all across the nation but since it doesn't fit the anti-gun narrative you won't hear of it. Why it is such a hard pill to swallow, is beyond me. But time and time again it has been proved that more guns equals less crime. Criminals don't want armed victims, they want unarmed, helpless ones and "Gun-Free Zones" offer an endless supply.

An armed citizenry makes for a unsafe working environment for criminals. They will get no apologies from me. It is supposed to.