The Unasked Questions About School Shootings (Sandy Hook)
I have been working on several articles, two of which I hoped to release in the next week. Unfortunately, I have put them on hold for a couple of days in order to write this very controversial post concerning the debates that will no doubt rage throughout the holiday season, because of the horrific shootings that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last week.
These kinds of crimes simply boggle the mind and leave everyone with their jaws agape, trying to make some sort of sense out of such an event. So, everyone does exactly what they always do in these situations, which is why they continue to happen. The media rushes in and plasters the identity of the shooter across the global satellites, when this type infamy was likely his motive and sends a clear advertisement to the next wacko who is seeking attention, that he too will be martyred (which is why I refuse to mention his name in this article).
And though the media will make this killer as notorious as he wished to be, there is no need for a criminal investigation, because the politicians have already convicted the firearm as the responsible party, the shooter was just another victim of the easy access to guns. Blaming the gun, or more accurately, the freedom to attain guns as the reason for these crimes is not only misplaced justice, but is not even asking the right question. The question should be; what would make someone want to shoot and kill defenseless children, irregardless of the weapon they use? Is it strictly access to firearms that is the root cause of all of these school shootings?
Americans have had access to guns ever since the American Revolution and there are far more gun restrictions now than there ever was in U.S. History, and Connecticut has some of the strictest. Why have we never seen these type of senseless shooting sprees (without motive) prior to the last 20 years? Billy The Kid, Jesse James and John Wesley Hardin did not shoot as many people in their entire criminal career as this nut-job killed in one day. One argument says that it is because people now have access to more powerful weapons which can fire large capacity magazines. Is this truly the cause?
In the 1920s, just about anyone could walk into a Hardware Store and purchase a Thompson submachine gun (which could hold 100 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition in its drum magazine and was FULLY automatic). “Tommy Guns” were used in the “Saint Valentines Day Massacre“, where it is said that some of the victims were nearly cut in half by the enormous spray of bullets. Bonnie and Clyde prefered to use the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), which had the capability of shredding through the heavy iron in cars of that period with its .30-06 rounds. So the idea that today’s weapon are more powerful and capable of a higher rate of fire is a completely erroneous one.
But even though their were bloody shootings in those times, all of the crimes committed had very clear motives. They were either based on greed (robbing banks or trains) or fights over gangland territory – never just for the execution of unarmed children, followed by the suicide of the shooter. If automatic guns were truly the source of the problem, then we would have expected to see similar school shootings/suicide from the periods of 1890s to the 1930s. Most of the violent crime from 1920 till 1933 was the result of the prohibition on alcohol. This prohibition actually increased crime in the 1920s in the same way that the “War On Drugs” not only helped to create an underworld, but has increased the size and power of such organized crime and placed more drugs on the street as a result – but I’m sure that the prohibition of guns will not have that same effect.
The school shooting/suicide that we see today are unlike any crime we have seen in the past. These shootings are completely senseless – the work of an animalistic and suicidal mind. So the other proposal that has been talked about all week has been government offering better care for the mentally ill. Yet again, we have always had mentally ill people here in the U.S., yet we have never seen these type of wholesale murders, with no apparent motive, happen with such frequency. Why does this new brand of mental illness seem even crazier than before? We should be looking for something new – something that did not exist more than 30 years ago. There is one difference that has yet to be discussed by any politician or anyone in media – and for good reason.
Though the politicians and media will bring the gun control debate straight to the headlines, it will be many months from now, when the people have lost interest in the story, that the real truth will slip its way onto page 14 of a paper or news website. This is what has happened in every other shooting. In over 90% of these completely senseless shootings, it is later found that the perpetrators were not only mentally unstable, but had been on antidepressants, mainly SSRI medications, for many years prior to going totally apeshit.
Please click on this link to see a list of school shooters and what antidepressants they were taking. That’s a pretty comprehensive list – and much longer than expected, wasn’t it (around 4,800)? All SSRI medications list the possibility of suicidal tendencies as a side effect and research has shown that these suicidal effects are much more pronounce in the younger patients that take them. Seniors have the least negative effects, but the younger the patient, the stronger the thoughts of suicide tend to be. Some of these shooters had stopped taking their SSRI, which are highly addictive drugs and can cause greater difficulties when sudden cessation of the drug is attempted. A person on these drugs must be removed from them gradually or really bad things can result.
Absence of these mind-altering drugs seems to be the only marked difference between killers of the past and these modern school shooter/suicide killers, whose actions of violence are totally mindless and suicidal. When these kids start mixing these pharmaceutical monsters with alcohol or illegal street drugs, like methanphetamines or Bath Salts, you have a real recipe for death and mayhem. The fact that this most recent shooting incident has created a knee-jerk outcry for better mental health care, means that the pharmaceutical companies will have more funding with which to create even more potent antidepressant drugs.
The correlation between these drugs and the total mental meltdowns we see are so strong that it begs the question, why is no one in the media, or the crying President, talking about this possible connection? Pharmaceutical conglomerates are major sponsors of the news media. Have you ever noticed the thousands of pharmaceutical advertisements inundating the local and national news media? Since when does anyone in the media speak ill about the practices of the pharmaceutical companies or the ease with which doctors prescribe these medications to children?
Because doctors have been elevated to a god-like status in our country, these drugs are always considered the solution to the problem, so people are incapable of considering them as a contributing factor (cognitive dissonance). The national media will always toss guns into the center of the debate while everyone’s emotions are running high, thereby putting up a smokescreen to where the real truth lies – because guns frighten people and prescription drugs don’t – even though you have a 6,200% better chance of being killed by a doctor than you do a gun. 290 people are killed each day in the U.S. by prescription drugs, and that only includes direct deaths from the drugs, not the deaths of those who may be killed by the one under their influence (shooter, driver, etc..). In order for gun deaths to eclipse the deaths from pharmaceuticals, there would have to be an Aurora, Colorado, Batman movie massacre take place every hour of every day, 365 days a year.
The pharmaceutical companies contribute millions of dollars to elected officials and until one of their concoctions kills thousands of people in a way that can no longer be hidden, then, and only then, will the FDA reluctantly pull one of their poisons from the shelves. The drug Vioxx killed nearly 60,000 people before the FDA finally took action. It is in the best interest of the pharmaceutical giants to protect the doctors, because it is only through the doctor’s license that their chemicals are distributed. Just between the years 1996 to 1997 the amount of children on antidepressants rose from 8,000 to over 40,000 and nowadays number continues to rise. There has no long-term study on the effects of these drugs on the developing brain of a child (mostly adult studies). These SSRIs are being handed out like candy on Halloween and not just by psychologists, but even General Practitioners have gotten into the act. These drugs are not only easy to get, but doctors seem to insist on everyone taking them. Here are just some of my experiences:
All of the intestinal transplant recipients were automatically placed on antidepressants (Prozac), because the doctors claim that 100% of them go into depression (I found that most people will take whatever a doctor gives them, so all of the other patients I know still take the antidepressants). When I refused them, a nurse told my wife that I was showing “classic signs of depression” (why does a nurse feel she can diagnose that?). Next, they secretly sent in a psychologist to examine me. The shrink found that I was not depressed and they finally got off of my back. I told them that I knew I wasn’t depressed, because if anything, I have high anxiety (probably from being cooped up in a hospital for more than a year) and they told me that the SSRIs would help with the anxiety also and still attempted to give them to me.
What? It seems like anxiety and depression are like polar opposites, yet, somehow this magical elixir can cure both. Years before I met my wife, she told me she had went to a doctor simply to get a blood work-up. The doctor ran the blood test and told her she was healthy, but then suggested that he write her a prescription for SSIRs. When she refused, he began to ask her personal questions – just digging for a reason to give her the antidepressants. She became offended by his questioning and never went back to that doctor.
I still suffer some chronic abdominal pain (most likely caused by surgical adhesions). When I described the pain to my primary physician, she wrote me a prescription for Prozac. I figured she was insinuating that the pain was all in my head, but she claimed that antidepressants also have pain relieving properties (what can’t they do?). Of course, I refused the medication. She then offered to write my wife a prescription for SSRIs, just because she was in the office with me – I am not kidding. She thought that my wife could use them because of all the stress she went through while I was in the hospital, yet my wife never asked for them, nor did she accept the offer. This is how easy it is to get these drugs. Doctors seem to automatically place everyone on them for any reason. It would certainly appear that there is some sort of incentive for doctors to write scripts for these pharmaceuticals.
Any child diagnosed with ADHD will ultimately end up on these SSRIs. Children, especially teenagers, can go through a lot of mood changes – it’s called adolescence. No one gave us drugs for that when I was young. As a matter of fact, one of the best drummers I was in a band with was a guy who was very hyperactive as a child. He had trouble paying attention in school, because of the ridiculous amount of energy he had. In today’s time they would say he had ADHD and placed him on drugs. Back in the 1970s, the doctor told his mother to get him into sports or buy him a drum set, so they bought the drums. He had been beating on those things since he was eight years old and damn, did he get good – and had endless stamina. That’s how they dealt with children back then, they tried to turn a negative to a positive – now we give them drugs and turn them into killers.
I have been doing a lot of research on this subject, even prior to the recent shooting. I have a grand-nephew who has been diagnosed with ADHD and is always getting sent home from school. I have a suspicion that his behavioral problems could stem from a wheat allergy, which seems to run in my family. I have seen him at family functions perfectly behaved until about twenty minutes after stuffing his face with tons of bread, cakes, pies or cookies. At that point he becomes a terror – totally out of control and unable to listen to authority – like someone on drugs. I know that all children love cookies and cakes, because I have 2 nephews, 6 nieces, 3 grand nephews and 2 grand nieces, but his craving for wheat is unlike anything I have seen in any of the other children. It is not just for sweets, he can’t get enough bread, and if he is not watched, he will eat an entire meal in bread.
Some studies have shown that a wheat protein called gliadin can cross the blood-brain-barrier and bind to opiate receptors in the brain (please read here for much more detail from Dr. William Davis on gliadin). This protein in the wheat can cause the addiction that some people suffer when trying to quit. My sister (my grand-nephew’s grandmother) claims that she had a horrible addiction to wheat and literally suffered drug-like withdrawals while trying to quit, including cravings. I have a friend whose daughter is autistic and he claimed that her condition improved greatly after her doctors took her off of gluten. So, I asked my niece to at least try to remove her son from wheat and see if he improved before submitting him to a life of drugs. Of course, her doctors insisted on the drugs and that seemed a lot easier to her. He is only eight years old and already on some mind-controlling drug. How many years will they be effective before he needs a stronger drug? All of these behavioral drugs have proven to be very addictive and become les s effective over time, thereby making it necessary to increase the dose or move to a stronger drug.
I’m not sure if he is on Ritalin, but it is some drug similar to Ritalin. From articles I have read, many of these shooters started out on drugs like Ritalin when they were very young. By the time they were 14 to 16, they needed to be placed on much stronger behavioral drugs, like Prozac or some other SSRI. There are more than four times the amount of children on these drugs now than there was just ten years ago. Are we to believe that the entire human race has suddenly become depressed and in need of these modern drugs? Has the human race suddenly become deficient in Prozac? If these drugs were actually warranted and effective, then we would expect to find that all of these shooters were people who were not on SSIRs and that all the children on them were functioning citizens. I could accept the fact that a very small percentage of the population may benefit from some of these drugs, but there are millions of people taking these concoctions and many of them started taking them as children. I believe that they are over-prescribed and in many cases just an easier way for parents to handle their children than proper discipline, exercise and a healthy diet.
There certainly seems to be a pattern emerging, but the media ignores it and the President and other politicians could care less, because they only use tragedies to further political agendas – never solutions that would actually reduce or stop the problem. After 9/11, every politician ran to push forward some bill that expanded government power and robbed us of more liberties – usually some bill that they had been unsuccessfully hawking for years, including a national ID card. Something as unconstitutional as the “Patriot Act” (completely shredding the 4th ammendment) could not have passed had it not been pushed through while emotions were high following the attacks of 9/11. No one can exploit a tragedy like a government can.
Even though there is quite a history now of school shooters who were life-long pharmaceutical addicts, it will be completely ignored by the authorities and the media. Obama will use this tragedy to pen an executive order and force another ban on some semiautomatic assault weapons, which will do absolutely nothing to slow down these school shootings. When the next shooting transpires, the entire media circus will start again and they will find a new gun to blame for the shooting and more money will be dumped towards mental health medications, which will be shoved down the children’s throats before any long-term testing will be performed.
I am not trying to make any political statement on guns here, so don’t start littering my comments with anti-gun propaganda. I am only pointing out that the politicians are not out to fix the problem. They seize these opportunities to further party agendas and in this particular case, it’s gun control. After 9/11 it was personal privacy that was targeted (because the hijackers used box cutters. Had they used guns, then guns would have also been targeted). I guarantee you that a ban on semiautomatic rifles will not make this problem go away as long as these children’s minds are being twisted by these SSRI drugs of the pharmaceutical companies or the withdrawal from them. The same way that any kid can get their hands on any illegal drug if they wish, they will always be able to gain access to guns or other weapons if they so desire – no matter how many laws you write. The U.S. spends billions of dollars per year attempting to enforce the drug laws, yet any teenager knows where they can score drugs if they want them. Stop kidding yourself about the wonders of contraband and how ineffective we are at enforcing the laws that already exist.
Just like with my grand-nephew, many of these problems start with food allergies and poor health from the horrible American diet of processed foods. If these highly inflammatory foods, loaded with MSG, aspartame and other exitotoxins are not damaging enough on their little developing minds and nervous system, we then begin shoving highly addictive and mind altering pharmaceuticals into their mouths at very young ages. I expect the problem to get much worse, no matter how many weapons we ban. Any weapon is only as dangerous as the mind that wields it. As modern food, environmental toxins and pharmaceutical drugs continue to get worse and worse, we may see a level of crazy scarier than anything we have seen to date. That one psycho in Miami that ate the face off a homeless guy is just a taste of where we may be headed if everyone continues to ignore the real source of the problem and continues to trust these doctors and pharmaceutical companies to make your children behave. That zombie guy didn’t need a gun. He was so insane that he simply used his teeth.
Let’s face it, the mind that would shoot other innocent children in such a horrific nature as we have seen in recent years, is not a mind that has gone mad by any natural means. We are seeing mental illness on a whole new level not seen since Vlad The Impaler or fictional bad men like Hannibal Lecter. I could be wrong, but I believe that they will find that this latest crazed idiot had been on these antidepressants since he was as young as the children he targeted. So far, the history of these type shootings have proven that to be the case.