The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Psychiatric Drugs and Government Involvement.'
Mass shootings have become a regular feature of American life. Whenever one happens, the media floods the internet with calls to regulate firearms more strictly. Along with blaming guns, mainstream discourse blames mental illness for the tragedies. These conversations ignore the inconvenient reality that both guns and mental illness have been prevalent in our society for far longer than the modern phenomenon of mass shootings. Clearly, there's something else going on with these events.
The first thing that's going on is sensationalization. When I hear 'mass shooting,' I imagine crowds of dead and injured. But the actual definition of the term has been expanded in recent years to encompass more and more incidents. Currently, "USA Today defines a mass shooting as an incident where at least four people are hit with gunfire, even if there are no fatalities." Here in Minneapolis, 4 people hit with gunfire and surviving isn't a mass shooting. It's just regular crime.
Giving it the mass label makes news headlines more clickable and ratchets up fear in the general public. It provides justification for unnecessary active shooter drills in schools. It provides the gun control lobby with new talking points. And, perhaps most importantly, it steers conversations about violence prevention away from workable social interventions and into the polarized political sphere.
Psychiatric Drugs
Looking only at mass shootings that produced mass casualties, some trends emerge. The most striking of these is the connection between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings. Talking about this connection is totally taboo, especially for doctors. Here's a quote from a long post by an anonymous doctor on the subject:
Oftentimes, “SSRIs cause mass shootings” is treated as just another crazy conspiracy theory. However, much in the same way the claim “COVID Vaccines are NOT safe and effective” is typically written off as a conspiracy theory, if you go past these labels and dig into the actual data, an abundantly clear and highly concerning picture emerges. There are many serious issues with psychiatric medications. For brevity, this article will exclusively focus on their tendency to cause horrific violent crimes. This was known long before they entered the market by both the drug companies and the FDA. While there is a large amount of evidence for this correlation, it is the one topic that is never up for debate when a mass shooting occurs. I have a lot of flexibility to discuss highly controversial topics with my colleagues, but this topic is met with so much hostility that I can never bring it up. It is, for this reason, I am immensely grateful to have an anonymous forum I can use. ... In the 1990s, school shootings transitioned from being very rare to a frequent facet of American life. As this timeline overlaps with the entrance of SSRIs to the US market, many articles have evaluated the link between mass shootings and psychiatric medications.
This post cites a disturbingly long list of medication-related mass shootings compiled by a gun rights website. The list is from 2013, and it would probably be much longer if events from the last 10 years were included. Many medications already contain suicide warnings on their labels. Perhaps there should be homicide warnings as well.
Government Involvement
In 2016, an undercover FBI agent was found to have encouraged a would-be terrorist to go on a shooting spree. Seddique Mateen worked as an FBI informant for 11 years, right up until his son Omar opened fire on the Pulse nightclub in 2016. The Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, may have sold an airplane to a Defense Department contractor in 2013. Time and again, whenever there's a mass casualty event, some level of government involvement in the situation turns up.
I'm not suggesting that the government was responsible for these events. But its involvement is notable. Each case is unique, and some cases raise the question of whether an attack was allowed to happen. There is also the issue of government agents applying psychological pressure to would-be attackers, increasing their stress levels. Maybe even pushing them over the edge.
Some people are convinced that widely publicized mass casualty events are staged. They think that victims are crisis actors being paid to fool the public into believing that fake attacks are real. The people who believe this are mistaken. And their folly muddies the waters for anyone trying to get real answers about these tragedies and how to prevent them.
Personally, I think gun laws in this country are adequate. But the tools used by mass shooters aren't the cause of their behavior. If they've been prescribed drugs that influence behavior, that's pertinent. And if they've had dealings with government agencies or contractors, that's pertinent too.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.