School Shootings: FACTS Trump POLITICAL CRAP (SSRI's)

So has been the political reaction to the shooting at Parkland -- the hard-left, which includes Nancy "gottapassittoreadit" Pelosuck and many others -- who immediately called for more gun control.

There's even Faux Snooz who ran an OpEd talking about conservatives "taking a stand against mass-murder."

Of course there's this lie trotted out when it comes to semi-automatic firearms:

Hunters or those who enjoy shooting clay pigeons don’t use semi-automatic weapons.

Actually, an autoloading shotgun, that is, a semi-automatic weapon, is indeed relatively common when shooting clay pigeons. It's also commonly used to shoot at live ducks and other fowl. All legally, I might add. For emphasis: Pheasant, in particular, are delicious and you can't buy them at Publix.

Then there's depredation, which is a very legitimate act (ask any farmer or someone who has various rodents destroying crops and other things on land); those are commonly hunted with semi-automatic firearms.

Never mind all the people who enjoy shooting at targets as a sport, whether just personally or in matches of skill under formal competition -- many of whom use semi-automatic firearms while doing so. In fact, the most-common civilian-owned firearm for this purpose might just be the AR-15, right near the Ruger 10-22. Both are semi-automatic. If your only exposure to guns is by watching movies you might try it sometime; you'll likely gain a bit of respect for how hard it is to shoot well.

Finally, nearly all modern cops are carrying semi-automatic firearms every day while on duty. Nearly all pistols are, indeed, semi-automatic firearms. Shall we go back to revolvers? Oh wait, those fire rapidly too, and a very cheap speedloader, which is nothing more than a piece of plastic of the correct dimensions, can reload them almost as quickly as a magazine swap.

But you should, if you want to reduce or even eliminate these "rage monster" attacks.

Your interest in this isn't just a political side show using dead kids as props, right?

I referenced this article from 2013 on the matter that I wrote in yesterday's missive. In it I pointed out that the prescribing information for these drugs -- specifically drugs known as SSRIs -- makes note of the risk of giving them to people 24 and under, especially if they have an un-diagnosed bipolar disorder.

It is very, very difficult for a common MD to detect bipolar disorders in their patients. The reason for this is simple: Someone who is depressed will often ask a doctor for help, but someone who is manic thinks they're on the top of the world and never asks anyone for anything! Even a trained psychiatrist has to catch the person in the manic state, or exhibiting signs of it. A "family" or "primary care" physician who might see someone a couple of times a year maximum as opposed to a psychiatrist who is seeing someone on a weekly or similar basis? The odds of that primary care physician catching a latent bipolar condition is damn near zero simply due to lack of time and exposure and I remind you that during depressive phases bipolar people are depressed!

We hand out SSRIs to people who complain of any sort of symptom of depression, including teens and young adults, like candy in this country and have since Prozac was first introduced in 1988.

It was not long after that when the mass-shootings by young "rage monsters" started. Go look it up.

In 2015, two years after the 2013 article more or less, I wrote another of my many articles on SSRIs that have been featured since The Market Ticker began publication. In it I made reference to two studies -- formal, scientific studies.

The first dealt with an infamous study by Glaxo known as "329" related to Paxil conducted in 2000. The problem with the original study was that the data analysis was faulty. The US Government claimed the company marketed it intentionally off-label to children and adolescents which is illegal, and charged them criminally. They ultimately paid a $3 billion fine but nobody went to prison.

Then the hammer came down: Re-analysis of the original study data showed that the drug didn't work in adolescents with depression.

But it was in fact much worse than that -- not only didn't the drug work it had a rate of serious adverse effects, including suicidal gestures, that were five times higher than those taking a sugar pill.

How many people are dead of self-inflicted injury due to taking a drug that, the data appears to show, not only doesn't work on that particular patient population it makes it more likely you will kill yourself?

If you think the crazy ended there with willful refusal to pay attention to scientific evidence, it didn't.

A second group took data from over 800,000 Swedish nationals -- an extremely large data set -- who were prescribed SSRIs and analyzed the data for coincidence with violent crime convictions.

Remember now, SSRIs are allegedly for depression, and depressed people tend not to commit violent crimes. They may become suicidal but not homicidal or violent toward others.

According to the data about 3% of the young people under the age of 24 who took these drugs had a violent crime conviction -- and that is double that of the next age cohort and double that of someone in the same age cohort who wasn't taking the drugs.

More-damning there was no drug-associated increase in violent crime among patients older than 24.

So we have a class of drugs where at least some of them appear to not work at all in the younger age group (15-24) and all of them appear to potentiate, in a small number of the people taking them in that specific age group, extreme violent behavior.

We also know that a gross over-representation, in terms of percentage of offenders when it comes to school shootings, are persons taking such drugs and virtually all of them are in the 15-24 age bracket.

This is probably not a coincidence given what the studies say about both the effectiveness and safety of these drugs in that specific age segment.

So tell me again why the FDA hasn't banned the use of these drugs in people under 25, and why the government hasn't prosecuted doctors for prescribing these medications to a specific age group that has a known association not only with suicides but also with violent criminal activity -- especially when the re-analysis of the infamous 329 study showed that at least one of these drugs was worthless in terms of actually providing therapeutic benefit to those in that age group.

We could also fire a couple of the non-teaching "assistants" in the schools (non-teachers have risen over 100% in employment in the schools over a period where enrollment has gone up 9%) and hire in their place one or two armed guards per school. It's a fact that all of these clowns come expecting zero effective resistance. Or arm the teachers; we already ought to be testing them for mental competence and stability anyway, since there are plenty of other problems with unstable teachers (e.g. sleeping with students, etc) to justify that. If the football coach that put himself in front of students (and was killed) had been armed it might have all ended right there in a very different way. And what's with fire alarms being able to be pulled, forcing everyone out into the halls? There's no reason for that given cameras and such; they should all be silent, ring in the office only, and once office personnel confirm there actually is a fire then the klaxons can sound to tell everyone to get out. That would have prevented "weaponizing" the fire alarms by the shooter, never mind putting an immediate end to the disruption that many schools suffer when unruly kids "pull" them maliciously to interrupt classes.

If you're actually interested in making a positive difference -- that is, materially reducing these sort of attacks -- then your effort should be focused on eliminating the prescribing of these medications, which the re-analysis of the 329 study says do not work and thus are not of therapeutic value, to those under the age of 24.

It might just be that simple given the data available. You can bet, however, that the drug companies and politicians won't like it if that turns out to be the case as they will then have to answer why they have intentionally ignored the scientific evidence for years and as a direct result there are dozens of dead kids -- including those who attended Parkland.

With the FBI working on overthrowing the president and local police providing sanctuary for illegals, personal defense has never been more critical.

That could be an erroneous conclusion. It could be that those 3% had a predisposition for violence already and were on the SSRIs because they had shown this tendency. It is not clear to me if the people of the same age who did not take the SSRIs were "normal". So, did the SSRIs cause the behavior, or were those people already violent with or without them?

‘So, did the SSRIs cause the behavior, or were those people already violent with or without them?’

a classic example of a question without an answer...

Interesting question. The effects seem to be in the - up to 24 age group. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if extended to effect yp to 26 years of age.

I’d like to see the age groups of our soldiers who have tried to commit suicide or actually did so and see if they were on SSRI’s at the time.

Perhaps these Meds helped take their behavior to the next level.

Oh, I think they can. As I understand it, SSRI's make a person not care about things that bother them. The hope would be that whatever is depressing the individual would cease to do so as the drugs give them a "whatever" attitude about their problems. However, I wonder if these drugs in high dosages can make a person so numb to feelings that it makes it easy for them to kill dispassionately.

A co-worker who committed suicide explained the impact of an SSRI drug. He said the thoughts of suicide were already present. The SSRI removes the inhibition to act on the thought.

Go back to the 1950s and 1960s. A 16 year old could in most states go to a local hardware store and buy a gun with few questions asked. Guns were in many households and there were no gun safes. In my area dynamite was routinely used to clear stumps and could have been easily obtained from many farms. When I was in high school half the cars in the student parking lot had guns on them during pheasant season. A good buddy carried a pistol in in glove box and we used to go out target shooting after school. Despite the easy availability of guns and even explosives I do not recall any mass school shootings. Something changed and despite far stricter gun laws school shootings have happened today that never happened before when guns were readily available.

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