Family is Most Important, Part 3: How to Stop Mass Shootings · 11:01pm Dec 27th, 2020
Despite the lockdowns and closing of schools across the country in response to the virus, the number of 2020 mass shootings in America exceeded the number of shootings in 2019. Weird, isn’t it? You’d think the rate would go down, but it hasn’t. I think there were even some instances where a kid shot his computer camera on Zoom, expecting the bullet to travel through cyberspace and reach his peers on the other end.
I could make the same tired case about gun control and repeat NRA talking points, but that won’t solve the problem here. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s very important to own and properly handle a firearm. But if I argue against gun control, that will only repel people who try to take guns away. I want to talk about why the shootings happen in the first place. If a person want to cause harm, they will find a way to do so, with or without guns.
There are three levels of problem-solving here. The core problem here is that someone decided to walk into a school or a business and kill innocent people. We could arm more good guys, but that won’t solve the underlying problem; we’ll just save a few more people from getting shot. Or you could make it harder for civilians to obtain guns, and now you’ve got mass shooters killing more people because fewer people are likely to be armed in response. Or they go into a gun-free zone, where every law-abiding citizen must not carry a firearm.
And even if you removed all guns, which you will never be able to do, the fact of the matter is, someone entered into a state of mind that was dark enough to compel them to kill innocent people. The Columbine shooters were going to blow up their school with propane bombs, which, thank God, didn’t work. Timothy McVeigh used explosives to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City. Al-Qaeda used pocketknives and box cutters to take over planes and kill thousands of people and destroy multiple buildings. Like I said earlier, if someone wants to kill, you will not find a way to stop them. You might make it a little less convenient for them, but in the process, you will make it significantly more difficult for innocent civilians to protect themselves. By the time they have reached that point in their lives, they will not care anymore. Their reason for existence has devolved into the destruction of their fellow man.
To be fair, some people have tried to redirect this issue towards what it is, which is a mental health issue. The problem is, they’ve been met with backlash for ‘stigmatizing mental health.’ Which is ridiculous, because to suggest a mass shooter is not mentally ill is perhaps one of the most ignorant statements you could possibly make. The conversation is then redirected by some of the most abhorrent and despicable people in the media--they perpetuate that most of these shootings are done by white men, then say the reason white men commit atrocities is because of their fragile male egos. Not only is this incorrect, it is a malicious thing to say. To suggest that mass shootings are a result of being male, or being white, is simply evil.
And I’ll explain why--it ignores the disproportionate amount of problems that affect white men that could perhaps explain why they’re disproportionately committing these atrocities. If there is any proof that white men are the most hated demographic, it is that. If you are a white man and you’re reading this, understand that they hate you. They view you as having privilege because of your gender and skin tone, and then, when you become consumed by darkness and decide to kill yourself or kill other people, they don’t reconsider their hypothesis and think, “Hmm, maybe they weren’t as well off as we thought.” They just say, “That’s what happens when you’re an entitled white man with a fragile ego.”
This is lazy thinking at its worst. People are not inherently good or evil. We possess great capacities for both. But both are very possible. And it’s the same stupid leftist narrative of undermining the importance of fathers and shaming masculinity that is breeding these mass shootings. If you want to stop mass shootings from happening, stop doing that.
One in three children in this country grow up without fathers. That discriminates against young men more than young women. Studies have shown that father absence leads to more mental health and behavioral problems in boys than in girls. According to two MIT economists, “Growing up in a single-parent home appears to significantly decrease the probability of college attendance for boys but has no similar effects on girls.” This is true; women outnumber men on college campuses. “Fatherless boys are also less ambitious, less hopeful, and more likely to get into trouble at school than fatherless girls.”
For boys, being raised without a father decreases their likelihood of being employed by 8 to 10 points. So what do they do when they grow up? That’s the thing, they don’t grow up. About 22% of males ages 25 to 54 are doing no paid work at all. They aren’t technically unemployed, because they’ve already left the labor force. They gave up. And who’s going to want to marry them if they can’t acquire any resources? And when girls grow up without a father, they learn that a long-term mating strategy isn’t such a good idea, since it didn’t work out so well for their own parents. So they start to have many short-term partners with a very high turnover rate. There’s even evidence saying women who grow up without a father start puberty earlier. Likely, this is because the process of short-term mating needs to be expedited.
Married men with high school diplomas are more likely to be employed than single men with some college or even an Associate’s Degree. So what do they do? They turn to opiates, which is an entirely different discussion, but you’d better believe it’s related. They also spend 5 and a half hours a day watching tv on average.
Meanwhile, their female peers who were not as affected by their father’s absence are now earning the majority of Bachelors, Masters, and PHDs in America. And women by and large don’t want to marry someone less educated than they are, so the balance is now completely shifted. As Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof said, “Men settle down when they get married. If they never marry, they never settle down.” Marriage motivates men to work harder, most likely an evolutionary adaptation, because if they don’t continue to provide for their spouse, she will find a higher-value mate who can. Married men work 400 hours more per year than their unmarried counterparts with equivalent backgrounds. A Harvard study shows that married men earn between 10 and 40% more than their peers with similar education and skills. And this was observed not only in the United States, but in the UK and Sweden as well.
When men grow up without fathers, they lose their sense of identity and can turn them into very dark places. As of February 2018, 26 out of the 27 most deadly mass shooters were either fatherless or had a history of domestic abuse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1980 and 2008, African-Americans committed 52% of murders despite being only 13% of the population. The single motherhood rate in the black community is 72%. You tell me when we can start drawing correlations. Growing up without your biological father is the single greatest predictor of whether a young man ends up in prison.
But feminists have underplayed the role of fathers. They’ve tried to shame men for their “toxic masculinity.” What they don’t understand is that it isn’t that masculinity is toxic; the masculinity simply isn’t there. No one is around to teach them how to be a man, so they become violent. Toxic masculinity is what happens to young men who don’t have guidance. Masculinity is competence, confidence, and bravery. Masculinity is four young men shielding their girlfriends as someone shoots up a movie theater, resulting in three of them dying, but all of the girls surviving. Masculinity is Todd Beemer telling Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick that they’d have to jump on the hijackers and crash the plane into the ground so the terrorists couldn’t fulfill their plans. Masculinity is manning up, which feminists say is a toxic phrase, but manning up just means stepping up to the challenge, facing your demons, slaying your dragons. For Todd Beemer, manning up meant, “Let’s roll,” which was the last thing that was overheard before the plane crashed. Young men derive our sense of masculinity from our fathers. And when you don’t have that, you get really confused.
I can actually speak from experience with this kind of dreadful feeling, and I have The Pony of Vengeance and blogs expressing my anger and hopelessness and loneliness to prove it. Obviously, I’m not a mass shooter, I don’t intend to be one, and I thoroughly disagree with it, but I do understand what might go through their heads. I read the diaries of the Columbine shooters, and I never want to do anything like that, and no one was going to get hurt--again, I have The Pony of Vengeance to prove it, if you know what I’m talking about. But I’m able to understand their state of mind.
They were so fed up with life and existence in general that they just wanted to lash out with the fury of their souls and give one last middle finger to the world before ending it all. I remember resonating with that, because from the beginning, everywhere I saw in my progressive liberal school, I saw mischief and disrespect towards the teachers, which I regarded as evil. I was kind of depressed and lonely, since I didn’t have as many actual friends I considered would be good influences, so instead of playing with them, I read books or went on the computer during Recess. I began my porn addiction and my introduction to My Little Pony as early as 6th grade, I ate lunch in the nurse’s office or the library because it was much quieter in there, I didn’t join any extracurricular activities except for theater in Senior year, and I remember getting teased for things which in hindsight were kind of trivial, but in the moment were overwhelming. I cried a lot compared to the other kids in elementary and middle school, and even sometimes in high school, when multiple forces seemed to conspire against me. It was absolutely rough. And I don’t exactly know the process by how I got out of this mindset, but I know there are many men who can’t, and even now I still feel residual feelings of shame and anger towards myself and others when I recall my past.
That got way too personal. I apologize.
Men need fathers. We don’t need less masculinity; we need more masculinity. Without it, young men become displaced and angry with existence. They hate the totem pole so much, because they’ve been shoved down to the bottom, that they’re willing to burn the whole thing down. Why do you think these things happen at school or the workplace? It’s symbolic of the system these participants have grown to hate. That’s why people in school or at work who didn’t even impact the perpetrator’s life find themselves staring down the bottom of a gun barrel. It’s the entire system that they regard as the reason for their suffering. So they go for total revenge on this miserable existence.
Of course, this doesn’t describe absolutely everyone who has ever committed violence ever, but I can’t ignore what’s playing a significant role in these incidents. Young men grow up in homes full of women, then go to school where they are taught by women and treated like defective girls; girls are the standard for which boys must be held to. Natural male aggression and restlessness is treated as disruption, and so in response, they are told to see a specialist, and now they’re on Adderall, ProZac, and Ritalin.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights’s investigation into school violence reveals that at least 36 school shootings or school-related acts of violence had been committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs, resulting in 172 wounded and 80 killed. In other school shootings, information about their drug use was not made public. CCHR says that training teachers and others in detecting and predicting violent behavior won’t stop the problem, because there’s no definitive science on how to actually go about this, even according to psychologists and psychiatrists.
According to Steven D. Hart, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, “There is no instrument that is specifically useful or validated for identifying potential school shooters or mass murderers.” An APA task force admitted that psychiatric expertise in the prediction of dangerousness is not established. CCHR says that although there can be numerous reasons for mass murder and violent crime, the presence of psychotropic drug use in the pediatric and adolescent population is a potential catalyst for violence in the percentage that is actually taking them.
Doctor David Kirchner, a New York psychologist, explained, “As a forensic psychologist, I have tested and evaluated 30 teenagers and adult murderers, and all of them had been in some kind of treatment, usually short-term and psychoactive drug-oriented before they killed. After each episode of school killings or other mass shootings, such as the Aurora, Colorado Batman movie murders and Tuscon, Arizona killing of 6 and wounding of Gabrielle Giffords and twelve others, there’s been a renewed public outcry for early identification and treatment of youths at risk for violence. Sadly, however, most of the young people who kill had been in treatment prior to the violence, albeit with less-than-successful results.”
A review of scientific literature published in ethical human psychology and psychiatry regarding the rate of mental health over the last 50 years, called Anatomy of An Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker, revealed that it’s not so much mental illness causing the problem as much as the drugs being prescribed to treat the problem. Since the introduction of antipsychotic drugs in 1955, and the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants like Prozac, in ‘87, both are documented to be linked to violent effects.
In the 1970s, 150,000 American children were taking stimulants for ADHD. In 2014, it reached 4.3 million. That’s a 2700% increase. The proportion of US children and teens taking antidepressants between 2005 and 2012 increased from 1.3 to 1.6%, despite the FDA blackbox warning in 2004 that antidepressants may induce suicidal behavior. Between 2002 and 2009, pediatric prescriptions for atypical antipsychotics increased by 65% from 2.9 to about 4.8 million. And 90% of those prescriptions are off-label, according to a 2012 study published in JAMA psychiatry, with ADHD and disruptive behavior accounting for about 38% of all antipsychotic use in children and teens. Almost 20,000 prescriptions for these antipsychotic drugs were written in 2014 for children 2 and younger--a 50% jump from the year before.
According to the prescription data company IMS Health, prescriptions for the antidepressant Fluoxetine, a generic of Prozac, rose 23% in one year for that age group to about 83,000. Researchers took the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System data and identified 31 drugs disproportionately associated with violence. These drugs, accounting for 79% of all violent cases reported, included 25 psychotropic drugs. Their findings, published in Public Liberty of Science 1, included 11 antidepressants, 6 hypnotics, and 3 drugs for the treatment of ADHD. Symptoms include disturbed mood, persistent insomnia, emotional lability, irritability, depression, impaired concentration of memory, and poor stress tolerance, according to a study published in psychotherapy and psychosomatics in 2012.
A British psychologist and others reported in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, “It is now accepted that all major classes of psychiatric medication produced distinctive withdrawal effects, which mostly reflect their pharmacological activity.” And just like the various substances that are used recreationally, each type of psychiatric medication induces a distinctive altered mental and physical state. Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs including antidepressants and antipsychotics is associated with distinctive withdrawal or discontinuation syndromes, which are suppressed and are significant, “Because they may be and probably are mistaken for signs of relapse,” according to their research.
Dr. Kirchner (remember him?) adds that, “Most of the young murderers I have personally examined had been in treatment and were using prescribed stimulant amphetamine-type drugs before and during the killing events. These medications did not prevent, but rather contributed to, the violence.”
Given all of this, it is insane that the small branch, the twig, of the mass shooting discussion that’s directed towards mental health, talks only about the lack of funding. If only we had more funding, we could fix this. I think that’s incorrect. The problem isn’t the funding; the problem is, the system you are trying to fund is corrupt and is trying to create the problem, not solve it.
The pharmaceutical companies largely dictate what’s being taught in medical schools, even down to the textbooks. Young med students are being educated to push drugs on patients and are seduced with educational grants. Thousands of doctors are being paid millions by pharmaceutical companies. Since 1990 they’ve spent at least 150 million buying politicians, mostly in the FDA, but also employ 1,378 paid lobbyists all over Capitol Hill. They spend billions in advertising annually, more than any other industry in the country.
If you talk to any doctor, they’ll tell you, “Yeah, I do have patients coming in and telling me to write them prescriptions for drugs they saw on TV.” In 2012 alone, they spent 3.5 billion marketing their drugs on tv, radio, magazines, and the internet, and went up to 4.5 billion in 2014. You know the ads; we’ve memed them to death. "Ooh, look! A running dog! Whoah! What're those words they're saying? What does that tiny text at the bottom say? I'm sure it's not important."
This whole thing is set up through the media, the cultural narrative, the educational system, the bureaucracy, and the pharmaceutical companies. Young men grow up in a house with no father (thank you, 2nd-wave feminism) to go to school where they’re even more feminized and made to feel ashamed of their masculinity (thank you, media and educational system) and are forced to take drugs that turn them into zombies that start to rationalize, “Hey, maybe it’d be a good idea to violently lash out at the world.” (thank you, bureaucracy and pharmaceutical companies.) Then, if they don’t commit suicide, like I talked about earlier, they’ll go do something awful, and the media goes like, “Aha! This is what happens when fragile male egos and toxic masculinity come together!” It keeps the wheels turning all over again, you idiots.
Actually, no. That’s the thing. I want to assume they’re idiots, out of a misguided sense of optimism that they have good intentions, but it’s not that they’re incompetent. It’s clear to me that what they’re doing is intentional. “Oh, if only they knew better, they wouldn’t do-” They know exactly what they’re doing. They just don’t care, because they keep getting paid.
They profit off every school shooting. The leftist media jump on that to push for more gun control because it fuels their narrative of, “Masculinity is bad, and so are guns, and men only posture with guns to make them feel more masculine! So let’s get rid of both! Make men more feminine and fund mental health programs that continue to prescribe men these drugs which have been proven to make them more violent.” Pharmaceutical companies say, “That sounds like a good idea to me,” and, inevitably: “Uh oh, another school shooting happened!” And it just repeats indefinitely.
This isn’t one of those “Big Pharma” conspiracy theories that say they already figured out the cure to cancer and are withholding it from the public, or something. That’s unverifiable. But everything I talked about is publicly available information! Go back and take a look at the links and the references I put in. It’s all cited and approved. And if you really want to help the country and stop mass shootings, you have to abandon the feminist movement and stop it in its tracks. It was the feminist narrative and the sexual revolution that undermined the role of the father and encouraged women to “break free” of the “prison” of marriage.” And now the left’s moral relativism says, “You’re judgemental for disapproving of single motherhood. Don’t hate on awesome single moms!” even though it’s been proven, time and time again, with mountains and mountains of peer-reviewed data, that the best environment for a child, and the one they deserve, is a biological, two-parent, married home, across all races, countries, incomes, levels of education, and ethnicities. Everything.
So given all this information, the fact that the people in the media and the people lobbying on behalf of “Big Pharma” and the doctors that sell themselves to it--given this, it can be either one of two things. Either A: these people are demonstrably incompetent and uninformed, and we should wonder why they are in these positions of power to begin with; or B: They possess a level of malevolence and greed that has transcended human comprehension.
You raise good points on a tough issue. Most countries in the Western world are currently working through similar problems, but the United States has the added issue of easy availability of weapons with which to take lives (guns, knives, explosives, and many others).
The solution will require a multi-fasceted approach, both to deal with the social factors and limit the availability of weapons (do you really need an AR-15 for home defence?).
5423616
I don't see why not. Remember earlier this year, when a mob was being held off from destroying a house by an elderly couple with AR-15s? And besides, if we go down that route, we'll invariably end up with something like, "Do we really need shotguns for defense?" The problem isn't the guns, it's the powers that have driven them to use those tools for evil purposes. As far as I'm concerned, you should be able to reliably handle and use firearms, no matter what kind it is.
You used broad generalizations based on extreme examples to label entire demographics/arguments to bolster your point.
One of your most recent blogs is you complaining about an extreme example used to label a demographic you're part of.
Pick. A. Standard.
5423628
Autism is a complex neurological condition, manifesting in multifaceted ways, which can happen to anyone and is something natural you don't exactly have a choice in. Leftism, and their end goal of a socialist utopia, is an immoral movement and idea you choose to follow that always invariably ends up in the same result: piles of anonymous bones.
5423627
That was what I was trying to get at, but phrased it badly. My apologies. If you have equipment, you should know how to use it properly.
My grandfather once commented that "a car is a lethal weapon in the hands of an untrained driver," and I think the same principal applies here. If you own a firearm, have the training to use it properly.
5423630
What you are saying is that Autism has an incredibly diverse range of spectrums, but everyone left of Center is the Extreme Left. You are immune to generalization, and this is due to a struggle that you didn't choose to have in your life.
You know what that sounds like?
Playing the 'Race card' to explain why you should have a privilege in a circumstance on grounds that you are *insert excuse*.
But for the sake of discourse, I'll bite:
If choice makes all the difference in the world, and ethics and actions are chocies, then let's look at another pair of choices: being Christian and being a Flat Earther.
If I compared all Christians to Flat Earthers because I know Flat Earthers who are Christian: would that be fair?
How about if I compared gun advocates to Child Molestors? Kody The Ultimate Brony (remember him? Yeah you do) was a very open advocate for gun ownership. Is it fair to compare you to him because you have gun advocacy in common? Am I fairly comparable to him because I agree with gun advocacy?
Do you see the problem yet?
If you specifically demonized the Extreme Left I'd have nothing to say, but your chosen term blankets everyone left of center and after enough moral posturing: it starts to look like what you mean is everyone you see as left of you as being Leftist.
I say again:
Pick. A. Standard.
5423663
I do see what you are trying to say, and I vehemently agree with your points. But the image that leftism has chosen to portray is the image I am choosing to address. I know there are liberals who don't agree with what the leftists in charge of the narrative say. That's why I didn't address them. And I know that there are always people who don't fit into the general picture; I took statistics classes too. But the direction the American left in general is going is a dangerous one, and the more moderate liberals can't exactly reason with their more extreme counterparts that are threatening to fundamentally uproot the country as we know it. People barely listen to reason; people listen to emotion.
5423666
If you see my point: then you should be seeing how you're not being any different (and thus no better) than the extreme viewpoints that you are expressing opposition too.
The moderate right politicians have just as many problems with rebuking their more excessive colleagues as the moderate left does with their more out of touch colleagues. The moderate right isn't taking a concrete stand against conspiracy theorists who are undermining citizen faith in America: because they know that it jeopardizes votes. The left side is just as bad by giving voice to modern anarchists but the only significant difference between the two, objectively speaking, is who you think is going to take less from you.
5423682
Speaking as one whose views are generally left of centre, thank you. We are not all Socialists and Communists (I'm certainly not), and are fully aware of the damage that the extreme Left is doing.
5423839
How about instead, get rid of the titles of leftist and rightist and be productive in getting shit done, we can argue about mental deficiencies in politicians later
5424177
The problem is that human beings like the idea of having clear choices between candidates. Having labels for candidates to describe their rough political alignment saves humans having to trawl through manifestos (which, trust me, most people are not prepared to do).
5424192
But I don’t understand how people can just think that these people are ok, every year only those with extreme political views get elected as president, there is never a level headed candidates, there is never anyone who thinks with reason or understanding, it’s only “if I don’t like it it’s not ok”, like wtf dude, why isn’t that the type of thing people are protesting?
5424540
Erm, no, actually. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn't (and don't) hold extremist views. In fact, all three were pretty moderate overall. Even Donald Trump's economic policies were not hugely different from those of his predecessors.
5424728
Ahh but here’s the kicker, did they actually do what they set out to do, did they succeed in doing what they said what they would do when they became president?
5425153
Very few politicians actually achieve their goals when they arrive in office. It's an inevitability of life.
I don’t know how to respond to this.
This is rambling and, sometimes, barely coherent rambling. You bring up so many subjects without connecting them together that it is hard to follow. You just don’t make a good argument that the different ideas you propose fit the narrative you try to make and you brought up disconnected subjects for no reasons.
I looked at your sources. You used mostly secondary sources but you didn’t even take the time to read and process them because if you had you wouldn’t have used them. That is, unless, you are so dishonest that you would use a source that has conclusions contrary to the point you are making because you can make the stats fit your narrative.
Words have meaning. Unmarried parents doesn’t mean fatherless.
Long texts don’t mean you’ve made a good argument.
I honestly think your opinions on big pharma need to be put into a separate blog post. By trying to combine it with this whole "a boy has to have a father or he'll kill everything in sight" rant lessens the message.
Big pharma isn't the only problem though, it is the American for-profit medical system that is a cancer, a cancer that enables big pharma to with hold the cures. You can get the same medications over in Europe for far cheaper. You want to know why? It is because their governments regulate big pharma, not the other way around. Here you have so many politicians bought off (both parties) that it isn't even funny. I'll guarantee you these institutions get kickbacks for every prescription of drugs they give those in them....many doctors get kickbacks and that is why more drugs are prescribed than are likely necessary.
When it comes to the conspiracy you bring up about them having a cure for cancer, I think it is pretty safe to say they have cures for many things. They won't release them because big pharma, doctors, hospitals, etc. can make way more money off of simply treating conditions rather than actually curing them. Could you imagine how much money Eli Lilly and other companies would lose if the cure for diabetes was released? You'd have health care CEOs committing suicide en masse (which wouldn't be a bad thing) because suddenly their gravy train would have far less funding. No more eight figure salaries for them!
My view is that they likely have cures for just about everything, they just won't release them. Human greed is to blame for human sickness continuing to get worse and worse. They come up with drugs that can cause all sorts of problems, primarily so that people will then get those problems and have to get treated for those too. It is all part of a diabolical joint plan between the AMA and big pharma....keep people sick and keep that gravy train coming for all involved in the plan.
Remember, big pharma and the AMA are the enemy, the enemy who sucks people's wallets dry by with holding the cures and only providing treatments.
5426535
It was just pertinent to the topic of how to stop mass shootings. The conversation happened to go in that direction, and I came up with relevant information to support both topical opinions and connect them. You get more than what you came here for. I also feel kinda tingly-in-a-good-way about this whole thing. I mean, finally, we can agree on something: our enemy here is big business and the big government.
5426544
Well when it comes to me, I am no fan of big pharma. Once you learn about the price gouging on medications and how much cheaper it is to make them compared to what they sell them for, you learn who the enemy is. I doubt we'll ever agree on everything but at least this is one thing.
5427060
Yeah, the government is cringe. And the people in charge are big dumb. The only issue is what we plan to do about it.