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Health & Fitness

A Few Words About the Tragedy in Newton, Connecticut

Should we have more gun control, or does the problem lie deeper than that? Perhaps psychiatric drugs that cause thoughts of suicide and murder are the blame.

Like everyone else in the country, I am shocked and saddened by the senseless murder of the children and teachers last Friday. Our human minds always try to make some kind of sense as to how and why this happened so that somehow we can understand it.  But this is just to horrific too grasp.

 

The media and most of the Facebook posts I see are blaming the prevalence of guns in our society, and that we need more gun control so that more tragedies like this won't continue to happen. This is not an essay about owning firearms which is a very touchy subject. But it is an essay about what may be the real causes of these outbursts of violence.

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Someone mentioned the other day that it's too easy to get a gun.  But there are more controls in place now than when I was a boy in the 50's and 60's and violence like this didn't happen.  Back then you could walk into any store that sold guns and just buy one.  No questions asked.  You could order one from a magazine ad and have it sent right to your house.  So what is different now? The difference is in the use of and over-prescription of mind-altering psychiatric drugs! These did not exist back then.

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From Columbine, to Virginia Tech, to Aurora, to Newton, the shooters were all young men labled with "personality disorders".  We do know that in Columbine that those two kids were on  psychiatric drugs.  Since then the media does not mention what drugs the shooters were on because the pharmacuetical companies hush it up and distance themselves from the event so that no one puts it all together.  However, these drugs -Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft - all produce the side effects of violent outbursts and suicide. They also can blur reality from fantasy.

 

If you read the discription of how the shootings played out, it's no different than how violent, war-centered video games are played.  These games now appear so real that the players may become numb to violence and the killing of people.  Couple this with these medications that alter the sense of what's real and what isn't. and it provides the perfect storm for when someone really snaps.

 

Instead of crying out for more gun control, we should be demanding investigations into the use of these deadly drugs that are causing people to become violent.  We should hold the MD's prescribing them accountable.  Maybe then this senseless killing will finally stop.

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