Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

There was a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Feb. 14. (Former?) student Nikolas de Jesus Cruz (who was reportedly a subject of bullying there) used a .223-caliber, one-shot-per-trigger-pull rifle (not an “automatic weapon” as claimed by Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson.) Young de Jesus Cruz left 17 dead, dozens more injured.

Needless to say, even though teachers there were warned last year not to let this kid into school with a backpack, even though the FBI was warned as long ago as September that Cruz left a comment on YouTube site warning “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” few of the usual suspects in the media waited for any further data before shrieking (yet again) that the NRA and every Republican in Washington have “blood on their hands,” etc.

CNN “news” host Chris Cuomo immediately stated the U.S. is the “scourge of the world.”

“The president has the hashtag MAGA, Make America Great Again. He is supposed to be a change agent,” Mr. Cuomo stormed. “We are the scourge of the world when it comes to these. Nobody is worse than we are. How does that not make the MAGA agenda?”

CNN’s Don Lemon declared that people who didn’t want to talk about gun control in the wake of the shooting need to “shut up.”

“Listen, you can save it — people who are saying, ‘Oh, it’s not the time to talk about guns’ or whatever. Yes, it is. Shut up,” Lemon said. “I don’t want to hear it. It absolutely is.”

OK, let’s talk about gun control — by which these characters obviously mean “banning guns outright for everyone but cops,” since America’s current 40,000 interlocking and overlapping “gun control” laws obviously aren’t enough for them.

Consulting the 2002 “Genocide chart” of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership at http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm, labeled “The Human Cost of ‘Gun Control,’” we find that in the years 1915-1917 Armenian Christians living in the Ottoman Empire were effectively barred from the private ownership of guns for self-defense (just the kind of “gun control” favored by these squealing TV hosts, who of course live in gated communities and work in fancy studios protected by armed guards) — making it much easier for the Armenians’ own government to murder more than a million of them.

We find residents of the Soviet Union, including political opponents and millions of Ukrainian farmers — farmers! — were effectively barred from the private ownership of guns for self-defense from 1929 to 1945, facilitating the murder by their own government, often by purposeful starvation, of 20 million of them.

Political opponents, Jews, Gypsies, etc., were effectively barred from the private ownership of guns for self-defense in Germany from 1933 to 1945, facilitating the systematic, assembly-line murder by their own government (not talking about residents of other nations killed in aggressive warfare, mind you) of 20 million of THEM.

What was the result of “gun control” in Red China from 1949 to 1976, when possession of firearms by, or supplying firearms to, “counter-revolutionary criminals” (basically anyone resisting any government program) was punishable by death? (And boy, wouldn’t our “gun regulators” love to have THAT power, today)? Another 20 million to 35 million dead, JPFO reports.

And I don’t remember the Nazis or the Communists exempting schoolchildren.

But just because they’re currently between genocides (the NATIONALIST Chinese killed 10 million of their own disarmed citizens between 1927 and 1949, after all, BEFORE Mao’s enlightened Commies took over. And let’s not forget the JAPANESE killed an estimated 300,000 unarmed civilians in the Chinese capital of Nanking — literally using many of them for bayonet practice — in a mere six weeks from December of 1937 to January, 1938), does this explain why our pals on the Leftist, anti-Trump, anti-freedom networks today decline to call Turkey or Russia or Germany or China “the scourge of the world”?

Of course not.

Unlike in Israel, where such attacks have virtually disappeared since teachers and parent chaperones started going armed, American teachers and administrators are barred from going armed to protect their charges. Mass shootings in America occur almost entirely in “gun-free zones” – sometimes “no-guns-allowed” theaters and shopping malls, but especially in our gun-free, coercion-based “public schools.”

These crimes are indeed terrible and deserving of far more realistic analysis, free of fear about offending a teachers’ union or the drug companies &helip; though I don’t think our “scourge” of a country is anywhere near our first 10,000 casualties, let alone our first million, as we struggle to record even a “drop in the bucket” in mass murders compared to the 20th Century death toll attributable to “gun control,” world-wide.

ASK ABOUT THE CRAZY DRUGS

What’s the solution? And could the press help?

Yes, possibly.

I spent more than 40 years in the news business. In a number of newsrooms where I worked, reporters covering fatal car crashes were instructed to ask police “Was the victim wearing his/her seat belt?” The idea was to use that news story to nag drivers to fasten their seat belts, by reporting “The deceased was not wearing his seat belt.”

This little bit of “editorializing” was fine as far as it went, I suppose — certainly “well-intentioned” — though I always wondered, if a rogue police officer were to risk a reprimand by saying “Actually, the only survivor lived because she was thrown free of the crash, since as it happens she was NOT strapped in,” whether my comrades on the police beat would have put that in their story, and whether our do-good editors would have allowed it to run.

Similarly, instead of shrieking “Clearly we need GUN CONTROL!”, when are the reporters covering multiple-victim shootings going to start asking — and reporting the answers to — a few questions that might actually help up identify and focus on the real problems?

1) Was the shooter using — or had he recently stopped using — psychoactive drugs, especially prescription Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors or benzodiazapines like Prozac, Luvox, etc?

As I’ve written before, In 1985, Hoffmann-La Roche’s patent on the widely used tranquilizer Valium expired, clearing the way for other outfits to begin manufacturing the drug on a generic basis. Since then, prescriptions of these “Mothers’ Little Helpers” for troublesome boys and young men have skyrocketed.

A Finnish study published in “World Psychiatry” in 2015 examined people convicted of homicide and found their odds of killing were a substantial 45 percent higher while they were on benzodiazepines.

While the vast majority of people taking these drugs of course do no harm, Eric Harris of the high-profile Columbine school shooting tried to join the Marines, but was turned down because he was on prescription Zoloft and Luvox.

Sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise was taking a high dose of Prozac in 2005 when he shot family members and students at his school in Red Lake, Minnesota, before turning the gun on himself.

A high-school classmate told Fox News last year’s Sutherland Springs, Texas, church murderer Devin Kelley had a history of mental illness, and had been on heavy doses of psychiatric meds.

The Web site of the Florida Citizens Commission on Human Rights notes: “Before the late nineteen eighties, mass shootings and acts of senseless violence were relatively unheard of. Prozac, the most well known SSRI antidepressant, was not yet on the market. When Prozac did arrive, it was marketed as a panacea for depression which resulted in huge profits&helip;. Of course other drug companies had to create their own cash cow and followed suit&helip;.

“Subsequently, mass shootings and other violent incidents started to be reported. More often than not, the common denominator was that the shooters were on an antidepressant, or withdrawing from one&helip;.

“The Virginia Tech shooter killed 32 people and he was on an antidepressant. While withdrawing from Prozac, Kip Kinkel murdered his mother and stepfather. He then shot 22 classmates and killed two&helip;. In a study of thirty-one drugs that are disproportionately linked to reports of violence toward others, five of the top ten are antidepressants,” the Florida based Web site continues. “These are Prozac, Paxil, Luvox, Effexor and Pristiq. Two other drugs that are for treating ADHD are also in the top ten&helip;.”

At www.ammoland.com, Dan Roberts reported back in 2013: “Nearly every mass shooting incident in the last 20 years — and multiple other instances of suicide and isolated shootings — all share one thing in common&helip;.

“The overwhelming evidence points to the single largest common factor in all of these incidents being 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.”

Question No. 2) Did the shooting occur in a “gun-free zone”? (Plenty of guns are “readily available” at police stations, but we rarely see mass shootings in THOSE government buildings, so the “ready availability of guns” doesn’t seem a very likely suspect. But “No Guns Allowed” signs seem to draw these creeps like manure draws flies.)

3) Was the gun stolen, as at Sandy Hook in Connecticut, and in the Kate Steinle murder in San Francisco? In lots of cases they were — though this simple statistic proves almost impossible to locate. (“Background checks” and “waiting periods” aren’t doing any good if many murder weapons are stolen. Furthermore, in many other cases the killers bought their weapons legally, passing a background check with flying colors &helip; so why do we bother?)

INMATES BULLIED TILL THEY SNAP?

4) Home schoolers and those attending private classes or academies where attendance is optional and voluntary seldom seem to engage in these homicidal activities. What is it about our mandatory government youth propaganda camps (“public schools”) — where the young inmates are locked in under penalty of law – that seems to trigger these behaviors?

Has anyone else noticed that the shooters seldom seem to be big, strong, healthy, athletic types? Are the small, pale, skinny kids getting bullied till they snap? If the youth propaganda camps breed this kind of violence, why doesn’t anyone suggest simply disbanding them?

Despite the fact this giant unionized “jobs-and-day-care” program for the otherwise largely unemployable now costs a hundred times more per student than the schools of a century ago (which turned non-English-speaking immigrant kids into the physicists who built the atomic bomb), they certainly aren’t producing many graduates today who can count change, do long division, find Paris on a map, speak a foreign Language, or explain if their lives depended on it the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re.”

But they sure can march in a “gun control” parade, organized and authorized by their unionized socialist teachers! Unless, of course, they try to carry a sign that SUPPORTS that Second Amendment. Can’t have any of THAT, as the little stooges are bused around at taxpayer expense:  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/03/15/watch-principal-removes-student-walk-participants-pro-gun-sign/ .

See also:  http://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2018/03/16/student-allegedly-suspended-refusing-leave-class-gun-control-walk/ , &helip; and &helip;  http://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2018/03/16/teacher-placed-on-paid-leave-for-questioning-walkout-for-gun-control/ &helip;. It’s all about Leftist indoctrination baby, not letting students voice divergent political views.

5) And we ARE going to check the immigration status of all shooters and stabbers now, aren’t we, gentlefolk? You guys aren’t going to try and cover up that little detail, like they now do in Germany and England and Sweden &helip; are you? Does it really make sense to limit the ability of American citizens in Vermont or Montana or Alabama to buy, keep, and bear arms, if the culprits in more and more of our killing sprees (or would-be killing sprees) are deranged recent arrivals from Middle Eastern or Latin American hellholes?

(If you’re not seeing frequent reports of rapes, murders, and vehicular homicides caused /committed by “Dreamers” and other illegal aliens, spend a few days checking Web sites like Breitbart and Daily Caller – you may find your favorite cable channel isn’t giving you “all the news that’s fit,” at all.)

Until the press starts doing its job – the REAL job of helping us understand what factors are contributing to this new phenomenon – I’m done “playing defense” against those who would like to see the American populace disarmed &helip; very much like the Jewish and Romany and gay and handicapped residents of Germany in the 1930s, precisely like the victims of Soviet genocide in the ’30s and ’40s &helip;

If they won’t so much as acknowledge opposing arguments and evidence — let alone attempt to respond with logic and evidence of their own — this isn’t really a “debate” at all &helip; is it?

They might as well be screeching “When, WHEN will you agree It’s time to throw more virgins into the volcano to placate Xiuhticuhtli, the God of Fire?!”

It would probably do about as much good.

A version of this column appears in a current edition of “Firearms News,” formerly “Shotgun News.”

 

Reprinted from The Blog of Vin Suprynowicz March 12th, 2018