Atlanta Shootings

45 auto


What are we witnessing?


As soon as the news media broadcast the story of a man walking into an office building in Atlanta and shooting people I just had to think, "here we go again". It's undeniably tragic. It's nearly mind-boggling. It's downright "crazy". And no, I'm not talking about the gunman himself. I'm talking about the timing of such incidents!

First, let's talk about this latest shooting. We have a man who, previous to coming to Atlanta, lost his wife and mother-in-law to a brutal knifing. In Atlanta he seems to be like anyone else, at least until he starts "day-trading" on the stock market, by all accounts the riskiest trading and the one which requires the most skill. He loses between $100,000 and $150,000 in this venture in several months. He's also apparently tormented by his failure to capitalize on the market movements. Who wouldn't be? If you suddenly found yourself $100,000 in debt with nothing to show for it?

What does this man do? Years ago, a man doing something like this might declare bankruptcy to avoid total personal catastrophe. Or he might commit suicide over his failures, but that meant flinging oneself off a bridge, overdosing on drugs, or a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound in a hotel somewhere.

But lately we've seen a rash of murder-suicides wherein the perpetrator goes on a rampage. Filled with anger and denial about his own responsibility for his own failures, he blames others, just as the Atlanta perpetrator did. He blames the "people out to get him" or the "people wanting to see him fail". He blames others for the situation he finds himself in. And if he sees suicide as his only exit, his anger sees "revenge" as his parting statement. Or ... is it that simple?

"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,
three times is enemy action."
- proverb

You've seen the same news reports I have. Start putting it together. There is a striking and shocking commonality to many of these shootings - and it's not guns! In many of these shootings, perhaps a majority of them, there exist some common denominators, but in far too many of them the same thing keeps cropping up. These people were being "treated" by the administration of psychiatric drugs. Consider the following information:
  • Kip Kinkel - killed his parents and then shot and killed 2 students and wounded 22, he was on Prozac and Ritalin.
  • T.J. Solomon - wounded 8 when he opened fire on classmates, he was on Ritalin.
  • Mathew Beck was on three different psychiatric drugs, when he opened fire at his work, killing four before killing himself.
  • Bryn Hartman was on Zoloft when she killed husband Phil Hartman.
  • Steve Allen Abrams was on Lithium when he purposefully drove his car into a nursery school playground, killing two children and injuring five.
  • Laurie Dann was on Lithium and the anti-depressant Anafril when she walked into a second grade classroom and began shooting children, killing one and wounding five before killing herself.
  • Patrick Purdy was on two psychiatric drugs when he opened fire in a school yard killing five students and wounding 30 others.
  • Kenneth Segund drugged his two children, took them to a pond and drowned them, then took an ax and killed his wife, he was on Prozac.
  • 16-year old Brad Pruitt fatally stabbed his own grandparents in 1995, and had been on psychiatric drugs.
  • 19-year-old James Wilson opened fire in an elementary school, killing two 8-year-old girls and wounding seven other students and two teachers. He was on Xanax, Valium, Thorazine and Haldol.
And this is just a partial list! Of the two kids in Columbine, Colorado who killed students and planned to fire bomb the school, one of them was taking psychiatric drugs. I suspect that we will find out that the man in Atlanta has been to a psychiatrist and been given some kind of drugs. In some of the cases we've seen, people have been taking these drugs for years and been fine. It's only when they stop taking the drugs that some people apparently fly off into a deadly rage.

Who's to blame?

We like to say that, ultimately, we are all responsible for our own actions, but that's not completely true. In the legal system we recognize that some people might not be responsible for their own actions. The insane, the mentally retarded, people under the influence of medical drugs and some people under the control of "cults".

I'm not going to claim that these drugs are the only factor. Certainly the individual's way of thinking, their own moral values and the quality of treatment they are getting all effect the equation. But these psychiatric drugs are powerful drugs. The Physician's Desk Reference (PDR) lists various side effects for each drug. Most of these drugs can cause things from vomiting to dizziness to violence in some individuals. More importantly there are warnings against combining these drugs with other psychiatric drugs! And in some of the cases above we see that this is exactly what has happened. So we have to ask what's going on here?

Some people, it turns out, are victims of the health care systems while others are at the mercy of government subsidized hospitals. Someone seeing a psychiatrist at their own expense for a while could exhaust their health plan's coverage, then seek treatment at a county hospital. The patient has seen one doctor for a while and is then switched to another doctor. In this case, if the patient doesn't tell the doctor about a recent prescription for one drug and another is administered a potential violent reaction could occur. Lithium and Prozac are known to be a violence-inducing combination.

This is just one example, I'm sure others exist, such as doctors switching medications on patients who should have taken all of their previous drug only to find that the patient has been "doubling up".

The Timing Issue

As I said at the outset of this article, the timing of these outbreaks bothers me. In April of 1999, it appeared that the subject of gun control was a back-burner issue for Congress. There didn't appear to be any urgency or momentum to push through the latest measures, until the incident at the Columbine high school. In June, Congress had slowed appreciably in it's Senatorial zeal to "do something" about it with the House calling for "calmer heads to prevail" in the debate. Then, suddenly the news is reporting another rampage where people are killed.

This has been repeated, time and again, from California to Colorado to Georgia. Gun control bills stalled out and within three to four months some "tragedy" has occurred which appears to be a perfect example why some bill should be passed. As one wise old sage put it; "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." But who is the enemy?

Summation

I don't have any evidence that anyone is "planning" these incidents. But neither did the average man have any hard evidence that the National Socialists were planning Krystal Nacht in Germany. I can't say that there is any conspiracy to produce these events, but the timing of them makes them suspect. The medical community has been bombarded with "propaganda" from gun control advocates that asks doctors to quiz patients about firearms in the home, then to urge gun owners to dispose of them as a "health hazard" (but strangely the medical pros are silent about power-saws, strong chemical cleaners and a host of other hazards). The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) agency has been slapped by Congress for misappropriating millions of dollars of funding marked for medical research to do political gun-control "research", most of which they won't make public for peer review (a normal practice for research).

But I doubt such a conspiracy would exist. Should it prove out that there is something behind any kind of "organized" effort, I suspect it would be done by people who were doing it individually and without much coordination.

The reality is that something stinks here. We might insist on closer monitoring of psychiatrists, or that they themselves monitor their patients closely. We might insist that a system be put into place so that doctors and pharmacists can verify all the drugs a patient is taking before prescribing a new one.

But I'm going to start asking my Congresscritter why no one has been looking hard at the psychiatric drugs, the doctors who prescribe them and the system by which we hold doctors accountable for their patients taking powerful drugs.
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