Originally published December 20 2014
Flawed study ignores role of psychiatric medications in mass shootings
by Jonathan Benson, staff writer
(NaturalNews) A new study seeks to divert attention away from the prominent role that prescription drugs play in mass shootings, instead shifting the blame to regular folks who possess firearms. By deviously lumping every media circus mass shooting in with all other types of general gun violence, researchers from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee hope that their fallacious statistical analysis will sway the gullible public towards future gun grabs.
According to the study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, focusing on mental illness in the post-massacre phase of a mass shooting is misplaced. Most mentally ill people are not violent, the study claims, which somehow proves that gun-related killings are more the result of guns themselves and not the people pulling the trigger.
"Fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness," wrote researchers Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish.
Based on this hypothesis, the duo maintains that mental illness, and the prescription drug use that typically accompanies it, is not a major concern for Americans, statistically speaking. The real problem is guns in general, they allege, warning that friends and family members are more of a threat when they have access to guns than lone-wolf shooters on psychiatric meds.
"We should set our attention and gun policies on the everyday shootings, not on the sensational shootings because there we will get much more traction in preventing gun crime," reads the specious study.
Most gun crime is criminally motivated by people who don't follow gun laws
The quip about "preventing gun crime" in this context is code terminology for forcibly seizing people's guns "to protect the children." It is the same tired and illogical argument often used by prohibitionists to continue throwing honest, hard-working people in prison for using the cannabis plant -- it's for the children!
Truthfully, though, almost every major mass shooting (if you believe any of them are even real to begin with) has a common thread of pharmaceutical influence that the media often hints at, but that rarely gets any further attention. Mass shootings of the Sandy Hook or Columbine type, at least according to the official stories, appear to be motivated by deranged mental states provoked by drugs.
The 32,000 gun deaths that occur in the U.S. annually, on the other hand, are mostly motivated by a desire for money, revenge or some other more logical reason. They typically aren't random with no apparent profit motive, and don't result in the shooter taking his or her own life. Mass shootings, in other words, are in a unique category of their own.
But this latest propaganda study intentionally obscures this important distinction, planting seeds of concern that one's friends or family members are potential killers just because they own guns. Don't worry about psychiatric meds thwarting a mentally deranged person's reasoning -- watch out for granny with her handgun!
"Nearly every mass shooting incident in the last twenty years, and multiple other instances of suicide and isolated shootings all share one thing in common, and [it's] not the weapons used," wrote Dan Roberts for Ammoland.com.
"The overwhelming evidence points to the [single] largest common factor in all of these incidents is the fact that all of the perpetrators were either actively taking powerful psychotropic drugs or had been at some point in the immediate past before they committed their crimes."
Sources:
http://www.newswise.com
http://www.newswise.com
http://www.naturalnews.com
http://www.naturalnews.com
http://www.ammoland.com
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