Mass Shootings: Is It About Meds?

I don’t make a study of mass shootings. Like certain other criminal acts, it’s an unpleasant topic that I tend to avoid thinking about. However, I have seen in the past that virtually all such killers are either users of illegal drugs or, perhaps more commonly, are on prescription meds. I’ve seen arguments both ways as to cause and effect or no connection at all. What appears to be true is that this aspect is rarely mentioned in the reporting. The Left—which seems to have a vested interest in meds—wants to talk about guns, while the Right is reflexively preoccupied with defending the Second Amendment.

Alex Berenson appears to have strong views on the matter, so I’ll be pasting in an excerpt from his latest substack. Please note—he’s a 2A defender. I’m quoting him for the contention that our children and young people are overmedicated—dangerously so. I’m sympathetic to that argument, while recognizing that very few of people on the meds Berenson names ever commit acts of violence. I’ve also read a fair amount about the possible psychotic inducing effects of cannabis, leading to violence. That’s an issue that Berenson doesn’t even touch on. So, FWIW:

Ashamed to be an American

Alex Berenson

The United States is sick.

I don’t know how to unpack my feelings today. I don’t know how to square my belief that the Second Amendment matters, it really does, the government cannot have a monopoly on the means of violence, with the sick feeling I had dropping my kids off this morning. Hug my six-year-old extra tight in case some devil with a hankering to destroy children exercises his constitutional right to walk out of the local gun store locked and loaded.

What is happening to our country?

Does it seem like we have more and more mass school shootings? That’s because we do. ...

And what about all the other shootings at festivals and colleges, ...

I know, I know we could ban every assault rifle in the United States and we wouldn’t touch the homicide rate. But we have to acknowledge that the repeated - and repeated, and repeated, and repeated - mass murder of innocents is a sign of deep sickness.

We have turned far, far too many teenagers and young adults into lonely overmedicated sleepless social media addicts. Yes, illegal drug use is down, but it hardly matters given how many young people are legally prescribed Adderall and Ritalin and Vyvanse.

All those are fancy names for speed or its chemical cousins, pure and simple. Psychiatrists and other physicians hand out so many prescriptions for these uppers - whose production is limited by the Drug Enforcement Administration -that pharmacies in big cities regularly run out of them and have to wait for new allotments.