Reader asks Vin to ‘Lay off the bullshit’
One “Etaoin Shrdlu” has posted a comment below my post “Too busy wiretapping candidates, rigging elections, covering their asses,” (immediately below) as follows:
“Hey Vin, I just read another of your articles elsewhere. Lay off the ‘SSRIs cause shootings’ bullshit, huh? I know it’s popular among the Limbaugh crowd to try to lay blame on SSRIs or anything else but the guns, but the fact is that for the vast majority of people taking them, we’re stabilized by them, not turned into psychopaths. If you want even more school shootings, cut off everyone’s medications so that they’re untreated.
“And I know perfectly well that sometimes people have adverse reactions. One of my in-laws had to be strapped into a hospital bed for a week until they got one drug out of his system. Guess what? It’s pretty easy to tell when someone goes berserk because of a new prescription, and it can be STOPPED really easily.
“Please give my regards to LNS; I hope he is doing better now. Kind regards, — E. Shrdlu, Esq.”
As 1,500 words is a bit of a heavy mouthful for the “Comments” section, I’ll reply here:
VIN REPLIES:
Hello, “Etaoin” —
You’ve posted your comment about the connection between SSRI drugs (including Prozac, Luvox, etc.) and mass shootings by troubled young men . . . most of whom appear to have been on, or withdrawing from, these very drugs . . . after a post where I believe I don’t even mention the subject.
Puzzled readers looking for some background may want to click through to my latest piece to mention this topic, at
(scrolling down to the sub-head “Ask About The Crazy Drugs” . . .
. . . where, for the record, I was careful to note “The vast majority of people taking these drugs, of course, do no harm”)
. . . or, further down on this site, to a Dec. 5 post titled “The Dog That Didn’t Bark,” (
https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=5953 ), scrolling down to the sub-head “What Links All the ‘Mass Shooting’ Loonies?”
The facts are: 1) Leaving aside systematic, government-approved genocides against Jews, Armenian Christians, Ukrainians, Native Americans, etc. (which are evil, but not our topic today), we search almost completely in vain for this kind of mass shooting by troubled young men, anywhere, before the 1980s. They are historically highly abnormal. So: what changed in the 1980s?
2) The prescription of these Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs — Prozac, Luvox, etc.) — along with drugs advertised as “controlling Attention Deficit Disorder,” including Ritalin — to young inmates of the coercion-based government schools skyrocketed during and since the 1980s.
3) Leaving aside Muslim terrorists as at Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon, many (probably most — though we don’t have access to medical records for all) of these mass killers were either ON these drugs, or in proximate withdrawal from them, at the time they committed these weird, anti-social crimes. (Specific examples are detailed in my two posts cited above.)
4) The lengthy, fine-print “warning” sheets included in the packaging of many (if not all) of these drugs –- required by federal licensing authorities –- mention such frightening, KNOWN AND ACKNOWLEDGED side effects as “depression, hallucinated voices, suicidal tendencies,” etc., and
5) The pharmaceutical firms that manufacture these drugs have a huge vested interest in discouraging or debunking or even threatening into silence anyone seeking to publicize these links, and plenty of resources to “encourage” those who are willing to do such debunking, dismissing those who gather up and attempt to publicize these simple facts as misguided or hostile “conspiracy nuts,” etc.
DRUGS NOT THE ONLY PROBLEM
Which of these facts is “bullshit,” Etaoin? None of them. Dismissing obvious or provable facts as “bullshit” -– simply because we find them unpleasant, inconvenient, or threatening — is probably not a strategy well designed to help us analyze the causes of mass shootings, or our efforts to prevent them in future.
If you want to argue that these drugs do more good than harm, feel free to present or link to some statistics to make that case.
I haven’t called for a “prohibition” of these drugs -– I’m generally against government Prohibitions, which only create unregulated “black markets” where the courts become unavailable to help enforce quality control and punish negligence and fraud. But could their formulas be altered? Might lower doses cause less harm? Could sensible changes be made in how they’re prescribed and to whom, possibly warning much more strongly against prescribing to teen-age males, or at least advising parents, teachers and others to watch for and promptly report signs of the development of the more dangerous side effects, to physicians who could then impose a closely supervised withdrawal?
We won’t know if we try to shut off these discussions by crying “Bullshit!”
Nor have I said or implied that these drugs are the ONLY cause or problem.
I’ve repeatedly said that arming teachers and staff who are willing to undergo some handgun safety training (as in Israel) would provide immediate on-site defense, as well as a disincentive for these crazy shooters, who do seem to retain enough sanity to seek out the soft targets of our “gun-free zones” (seldom attacking police stations, for example.)
But the coercion-based government youth propaganda camps (“public schools”), as well as being the TARGETS of most such shootings, are clearly also the breeding ground of the problem. Home-schooled kids don’t do this shit.
Why?
For one thing, gathering young people together by age cohort, locking them away from the adult society amidst which they would ENJOY learning how to be normal adults, is unnatural, even perverse. It also encourages the young and the weak to be bullied mercilessly. Attend a screening or “Rock ‘N Roll High School” or watch the episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in which the high school gets blown up. Listen to the cheers from those who survived this “institution.” Does this teach us nothing?
Our government schools are now largely run by women — both as teachers and as administrators. (And what men remain are essentially gelded by the regulatory and administrative structure. How free are they, really, to say, “You boys seem restless, let’s just leave all these books and go out and take a nature walk, or play a pick-up game of touch football”?)
Women, though of course they have some fine and indispensable attributes, are not well suited to raising and schooling teen-age boys, since they’ve never BEEN teen-age boys. Male fathers and father-figures are not only better at disciplining young men (and I do not use “discipline” simply as a synonym for “punishment”), they also understand that these kids need to be active. Many teen-age youths, newly come into their strength and virility, are literally, physically unable to sit still, walled up in boring classrooms, for interminable hour after hour.
In part since FEMALE administrators and teachers could literally be quickly overpowered by even a single teen-age boy — let alone a group of them — they seek to impose and maintain institutional “order” above all. So they welcome a medical excuse to treat the alleged “hyperactivity” of these young men as a disruptive DISEASE, dosing them up with various drugs in hopes they can get them to sit still, even it means the subject boys are turned into zonked-out, anti-social zombies. (See the vast expansion of the extra-funded “special needs” classification -– implying all these lads are “retarded,” even if the use of that word itself is now banned.)
I see this as a problem.
Furthermore, bright, inquisitive children of normal intelligence could absorb far more useful knowledge and skills than they currently get in 12 or 13 years of government schooling, in as few as three to seven years -– much of the later years in self-guided reading -– as was common in this country before the Civil War and certainly before 1917, when we produced some of our greatest and most productive geniuses.
(I doubt most government-school inmates today could even stand and read aloud and make sense of the letters of Jefferson and Washington -– the latter honored above all for his “character” but NOT considered an intellectual giant of his time -– let alone pen anything demonstrating an equivalent eloquence, vocabulary, or complexity of thought. Yet these men never set foot in any institution resembling today’s “public schools,” and their TOTAL “schooling” amounted to only a few years, mostly self-directed in the libraries of their rural neighbors.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Government schooling today is s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d- o-u-t to (and past) age 18 because a) it’s a jobs program, where today barely 50 percent of the staff actually teach in a classroom — tax-subsidized in a way that rewards every possible incentive for keeping bored butts in the seats — and b) because of the fallacious theory that citizens aged 15 to 18 have to be kept off the job market because there “aren’t enough jobs to go around.”
How many of these mass shooters have been married? None that I know of. Yet it’s obviously biological more normal, sensible and healthy for young people to marry and start families soon after reaching sexual maturity -– certainly by age 17 or 18, as was common in this country before 1917 and as remains common in much of the world.
Why does our culture (and that of modern Europe) discourage such healthy behaviors? A change here would obviously boost our statistical “fertility rate” (now dangerously low, inviting dangerous levels of non-assimilating immigration), while as a bonus having a hugely stabilizing influence on our young men, who would thus find themselves with a responsible role in the adult community, with families to support -– as was normal for tens of thousands of years, up until the past century?
Part of the problem, clearly, is the personal wage tax (still called the “income tax,” though in legal terms “income” used to mean something other than wages, or profits made on the investment of AFTER-TAX wages), which since the Second World War has turned us from a nation where a family could be supported in a free-standing home by a SINGLE breadwinner, into a land where most wives must now work outside the home just to add enough to the family income to pay the wage (“income”) tax.
The best solution would be to repeal entirely the unnecessary “income tax” (a tax which is barred by the 13th amendment, as well as by the specific limitation to two specific types of federal taxes in the Constitution as written), paring down the size and cost of the central government as necessary. A second-best solution would be to exempt from the income tax all those under the age of 25, giving them a chance (and in fact encouraging them) to start a home and family at a more biologically sensible age. (They don’t currently pay a lot, anyway, since so few of them earn a decent living.) Huge “income tax” deductions could also be offered to older parents who offer to help their newly married 16-to-21-year-old children buy or build homes or enter into trade apprenticeships.
“Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.” — John Taylor Gatto, New York City (and state) Teacher of the Year 1989, 1990, and 1991.
We’re not very creative in analyzing these problems, or envisioning solutions. We tend to be very blindered, assuming that “we couldn’t possibly SURVIVE” without an “income tax” that our great-grandparents were assured would “only affect millionaires” and that was unknown from 1607 to 1912 . . . and that OF COURSE no institution as large and well-established as “the public schools” could be inherently evil, or subject to massive deconstruction or even total elimination. (Read or watch some John Taylor Gatto . . . please:
(Take a look at https://www.amazon.com/Underground-History-American-Education/dp/B000KF42JK . . . . . or . . . . . http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?43292-John-Taylor-Gatto-book-free-online .)
It doesn’t help, of course, that the loud minority who favor totalitarian collectivism (and their Useful Idiot followers, including non-English-speaking Mexican hotel maids bused to early voting stations by the Culinary Union – ( https://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/oct/29/unions-flex-muscle-in-nevadas-high-stakes-senate-r/ ) use every opportunity to shriek that we must disarm the peasant class -– the way Hitler and Stalin did, and for the same terminal purpose -– thus drawing us ever back into defending the keystone of our liberties in a pointless debate over a “gun-control solution” which wouldn’t work, and can never be allowed to happen in a free land.
February 18th, 2018 at 2:42 pm
“Attend a screening or “Rock ‘N Roll High School” or watch the episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in which the high school gets blown up. Listen to the cheers from those who survived this “institution.” Does this teach us nothing?”
I like to think it teaches us the same lesson as do the cheers that erupted from the first-run theatre audiences during the scene in “Independence Day” when the aliens disintegrate the White House. That one all-American audience reaction was more spontaneously genuine than the “findings” of decades of MSM push-polls.
February 18th, 2018 at 11:04 pm
Thanks Vin,
I got a lot of the info after the incidnt where the kid in Washington state killed his dad with a pistol that was bought so they could spend time together after the kid started on one of those drugs. He left the drug on Drs orders after he was doing better. He killed both parents then went to school where he shot some number of students. He was tackled when he flubbed a reload . Enemedia concealed the drug use and withdrawal
February 19th, 2018 at 1:03 pm
I’m old enough to have watched the original Carrie (the good one, with all the nudity and Sissy Spacek). I remember how the drive-in erupted in roars of delight as Carrie brought the whole rotten high school down around people’s ears.
And after Columbine, there were a lot of people who were willing to say that they understood where Klebold and Harris got their rage from….
February 22nd, 2018 at 10:32 am
There is a significant difference between benzodiazepines and SSRI’s. Prozac is an SSRI as an example. Benzodiazepines are drugs like valium. The mechanisms of action are completely different including effects, dosing, usages and how they are treated in an overdose situation. Alcohol potentates the effects of both classes of drugs.
In such arguments, which are entirely valid, please get the medical facts straight or it greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the discussion.
I’ve been in EMS for 20 years feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
February 23rd, 2018 at 9:11 am
Another great source is Thomas Sowell’s ‘Inside American Education”
“When given science questions on “everyday facts” American youngsters did almost as well as Korean youngsters, answering correctly 96 percent of the time, as compared to 100 percent among the Koreans. But when required to “apply simple principles,” a significant gap opened up, as Koreans answered correctly 93 percent of the time and Americans only 78 percent of the time.
Going on to a higher level, requiring students to “analyze experiments,” Korean youngsters answered correctly 73 percent of the time, while Americans answered correctly only 42 percent of the time.”
And this is 1991; imagine what it us today…20%, maybe??
February 23rd, 2018 at 11:45 am
Good point, JoeMedic — A lot of my sources intermix the SSRIs with the benzodizaepines. They can indeed both be dubbed “psychoactive mood-altering drugs,” but act differently.
And just as heroin was developed as a “better, safer” substitute and/or cure for morphine addiction, so the SSRIs tend to be marketed as “less habit-forming” then the benzodiazepines, and I presume that tends to give doctors confidence they can “safely” be used over longer periods of time.
Is one group of drugs “safer,” when it comes to triggering these events in (admittedly) a minority of users? Can the period of withdrawal actually be more dangerous than the period of active use? Where do the drugs usually prescribed for “Attention Deficit Disorder” fall on this spectrum?
If you’d care to share a few links where folks can find a reliable run-down, feel free.
— V.S.