mass shootings

I’ve managed to steer clear of social media and the ongoing debates about flags and guns this week. As my mom always says, “Don’t let your bulldog mouth overload your jaybird ass”. Yeah…she really says that. And she also knows that she raised my sister and me to make sure anything we do say is loud and clear – whether it’s right or wrong. So, right or wrong (but definitely right), here goes…

There will never be a time when this country is rid of every non-law enforcement gun. Ever. It’ll never happen – and that’s the way it should be. Aside from the Constitutional arguments many are making, the truth is you can’t unring a bell. These ideas for stronger background checks and ensuring guns don’t land in the wrong hands are absurd. Sure, there are many who will gladly hand over every firearm they own to the government – and then there are those who will dare to stand and say to that same government, “Over my dead body.”

Despite the common denominator in so many of these shooters’ lives, people still focus on the guns they used to devastate other lives. When are we going to wake up and acknowledge the real root of the problem? I think the gun argument is safer than the truth, but really, how much longer are we going to keep the focus on anything but what’s really going on?

You can’t put kids on psychotropic drugs, knowing the potential for far worse problems – including murder and suicide – and then demand the rest of the country to fall in line behind some ridiculous “remove all guns” campaign.

There was a time when these problems did not exist. It was before, of course, the introduction of dangerous and powerful chemicals for our children as a way of “fixing” them.

Let’s lay everything aside for just a minute and consider these facts:

In the US, the use of Ritalin and other stimulants commonly prescribed for ADHD increased in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. By 1990, Ritalin sales in the United States increased 500 percent. Use of Ritalin and the other commonly prescribed psychotropic have increased every year since.

After the Charleston shooting last week, Obama wasted no time using it as further justification in his anti-gun nonsense.

Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.

He’s right; this type of mass violence isn’t occurring as often in other countries. Maybe this is why:

The United Nations reports that the US produces and consumes as much as 85 percent of the world’s production of Ritalin.

Don’t get hung up on the “it’s just Ritalin” (Methylphenidate) argument – the problems trace right back to the collective go-to antipsychotic drugs prescribed to our kids today, including Adderall, Concerta, Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, Risperdal, Seroquel, Abilify, Klonopin (yes, there are Klonopin prescriptions being written for kids), Xanax, Ativan. By the way, we have more than one million kids younger than 5 who are taking these drugs, the same ones that include:

250 drug regulatory warnings
295 studies regarding dangers of taking and/or coming off of the drugs
Black box warnings for really young patients

The fact is, most juvenile shooters are white males. Now consider this:

Minority children were less likely than white children to receive an ADHD diagnosis. With time-invariant and -varying confounding factors statistically controlled the odds of ADHD diagnosis for African Americans, Hispanics, and children of other races/ethnicities were 69%, 50% and 46% lower, respectively, than for whites. (Source).

And here’s a truth for you:

Gun ownership in the U.S is actually down. So now what? At some point, we, as Americans, will have to rethink the common denominators in these types of mass shootings. How much longer can we continue down this path, with little, if any, justification for laying the blame squarely on the gun debate?

How did we go from a nation that treated gun ownership as one of those rights to be treasured to one that has seen people blame firearms for all of the problems of today’s troubled young people? How is it we had a total of two shootings between 1950 and 1959 by two people younger than 21 to the more than 15 so far this year alone? Some days, there are actually two shootings occurring simultaneously by people younger than 21 in this country:

On May 12, 2015, an 18 year old student shot himself in his school’s breezeway in Tempe, AZ. At the same time, in Jacksonville, a 16 year old kid was shooting bullets into a school bus. He hit two students.

That whole 2nd Amendment argument simply doesn’t measure up, especially considering fewer Americans own guns today. The only – THE ONLY – consistency is the number of kids who are taking prescriptions for depression, attention deficit and other mental illnesses is growing right along with the number of shootings in this country. If these shootings are primarily committed by young, white males and at the same time, it’s also young, white males who are being prescribed these drugs in higher numbers, why is the media insisting on ignoring that? Where are the ethical doctors who are willing to stand up and say, “Oh, hey…y’all might want to consider…”

That’s it. The gun argument does not support the numbers. It just doesn’t.