Ahh, the day after a high-profile mass shooting in America: the only time Republicans will ever pretend to care about the mentally ill.
A man, pictured above, killed twelve people with a gun at a California bar yesterday, then turned the gun on himself bringing the total number of dead to thirteen. Like a disproportionately high number of mass shooters in the US, he served in the military. He reportedly suffered from PTSD as a result of his experiences in Afghanistan with the US Marines. America’s war in Afghanistan is the longest war in US history.
The shooter was deployed to Afghanistan during the period when the US sustained the most casualties of the entire war: 2010-2011 https://t.co/UmiZ4lSnlV
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 8, 2018
We all already know the script by heart now. A loud demand for gun control legislation will come from Democrats and progressives, while conservatives will insist that America’s mass shooting epidemic is a mental health issue, not a gun issue. This debate will rage on impotently for a few days to a few weeks, and exactly zero changes will be made in US gun policy or in mental health care. Happens every single time.
That’s really the only debate Americans are allowed to have about these shootings, and it’s already seeing arguments cranked out by both sides marching everyone into their respective partisan stables. The spectrum of acceptable debate has been narrowed down to two opposing viewpoints which cancel each other out, neither of which will ever come anywhere remotely close to inconveniencing anyone who has real power.
You should always be skeptical when you see a popular line of debate like this. Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
The propagandists who manipulate your society are constantly trying to narrow that spectrum of debate to the point where it’s just empty bickering which poses no real threat to real power. They want you arguing about whether or not Democrats are better than Republicans, not whether the two-party system is rigged for the elite class that owns it.They want you arguing about Trump’s rude tweets and the hurt feelings of Jim Acosta, not this administration’s persistent advancement of longstanding, world-threatening neoconservative military agendas. They want you arguing about whose speech should be censored on the internet, not whether there should be internet censorship at all. They want you arguing about who is and is not a “terrorist”, a label that is useful only to the government agencies who leverage that word to justify increasing government intrusiveness. They want you fighting to control the position of an on/off switch that isn’t connected to anything.
The plutocrats who use mass media propaganda and alliances with opaque government agencies to manipulate public thought to their advantage do not actually care if civilians are shooting each other, as long as it doesn’t damage their investments. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to put in your gun, nor do they care if the mentally ill receive adequate treatment. They care very much, however, about their ability to manufacture consent for the endless military campaigns they wage for profit and geopolitical dominance.
It is already well documented that individuals who’ve served in the US military are at least twice as likely to commit mass shootings as the rest of the adult population, and this should surprise no one. Being exposed to meaningless acts of slaughter can break your mind, which is why there is a suicide epidemic among US veterans. Couple that factor with PTSD and the way servicemen are psychologically conditioned and desensitized to the killing of human beings, and you’ve got a recipe for mass murder when those men come home.
Of course, not all mass shootings are committed by veterans; two-thirds are committed by people who’ve never served in the military. And I maintain that those shootings are directly related to US warmongering as well.
The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human experience are (1) consciousness itself, (2) the extent to which compulsive thinking habits dominate our lives, and (3) the extent to which we are influenced by domestic propaganda. American society is saturated in war propaganda, and has been for a long time, to the extent that hardly anyone even notices it anymore. It’s like that old joke about the two fish who are asked “How’s the water?” by a passing duck and then turn to each other to ask “What’s water?”; things like ubiquitous flag worship, intelligence and defense agencies influencing Hollywood movie scripts, the way the mass media consistently rallies in support of every new military campaign while ignoring the endless ongoing nature of old ones; these things are all so pervasively normalized that they don’t stand out against the background much.
But they are very abnormal, and they have real consequences. If we lived in a healthy, peaceful world where wars suddenly started happening, every single person would recoil with horror and do everything in their power to stop it. But because it’s something we’re born into and indoctrinated into accepting as normal, it just gets taken on as a natural part of life, and because Americans happen to live where the western empire concentrates most of its military might, they are the most pervasively propagandized people on earth. So now it just slides right into their minds unchecked when CNN stages a fake interview featuring a little Syrian girl reciting scripted war propaganda, when US media squeals with delight every time Trump bombs Syria, when war criminals like George W Bush are humanized and embraced by his ostensible opposition, the way dangerous new cold war escalations are being continually advanced against Russia while the mass media tells US liberals that Trump is too soft on Putin, to name just a few very recent examples.
If war propaganda didn’t significantly impact the public psyche, nobody would use it. The correlation between mass murder in the US and domestic war propaganda has not been scientifically researched, because the suggestion that domestic war propaganda exists in the US has not gained mainstream acceptance. Anyone who paid attention to western media’s unforgivable facilitation of the invasion of Iraq knows that corporate news media is such a reliable a partner to the US military that it may as well be a part of the military itself, but the first order of propagandizing an ostensibly free country is to hide the fact that that country is being propagandized. If it entered into mainstream awareness that the powerful people who control the mass media are using it to manipulate the way Americans think, perceive, behave, and vote, trust in those outlets would fall away and the ability to propagandize the masses would be lost. Americans not realizing that they are propagandized is itself a product of propaganda.
Lack of scientific inquiry notwithstanding, what else could explain the uniquely American mass shooting epidemic? Surely access to firearms is a factor, but other countries like Switzerland have similarly liberal gun laws without anything like the level of violence seen in the US. Surely mental health is a factor as well, but neither mental health problems nor lack of healthcare is a problem unique to the US. There is nothing like the mass shooting epidemic in the United States anywhere else in the world, nor indeed anywhere else in recorded history. Name me one thing unique to America that could possibly explain its unique mass shooting problem besides the fact that the American psyche is necessarily pummeled with war propaganda day in and day out in order to manufacture consent for US war agendas, and sometimes the mind gets bent so far it breaks.
Again, I am not saying that guns or mental health aren’t factors in this phenomenon, and I am not saying that these aren’t debates that Americans should be having with each other. But the fact that domestic propaganda can undeniably be found throughout the US media and the fact that mainstream psychology is completely ignoring its effects means that there are definitely leviathans moving beneath the surface of social consciousness which have yet to have any light shone on them.
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65 responses to “US Mass Shootings: Gun Issue, Mental Health Issue… War Issue?”
This man was disturbed.
A product of our hypocrisy – what we preach v. what we do.
He could not handle the moral dilemma of what he had been required to do.
I believe many veterans are dealing with same.
It’s OK to slaughter their children but not the ones on this side of the line – only a monster would do that.
Soccer mom’s of the world unite.
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it” … Mark Twain
“Presidents aren’t elected, they’re selected” … Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“I don’t vote because it’s meaningless. This country was bought, sold, and paid for a long time ago” …George Carlin
“Elections are funny. The government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex” … Frank Zappa
It’s not a new phenomenon.
Similarly, government data – particularly economic – are complete fabrication.
One should vote, it’s all we have. Some question about weather votes are actually counted (or would be if it mattered). Why anyone would vote for either of the “two” parties is beyond me.
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
– Winston Churchill
Yes, but Churchill is also famously quoted as saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all others.”
In other words, despite all its faults, it’s still better than any of the alternatives. Like, what would you prefer? Totalitarianism?
What we have is the pretense of democracy.
No, hold on a minute there, Jared, you were citing Churchill’s quote derogating democracy, so now you think genuine democracy would be better than what we have, which is a fake democracy? You’re not getting off that easily. Are you for democracy or against? And how much democracy do you think we can handle? You staked out one position and then ran away from it. You still don’t say what you prefer.
Well, OK.
You would like to corner me into the arguement that you would like to have.
The gist of my comments were:
1) democracy is not workable.
2) We do not have a democracy.
I think it would be constructive to recognize those facts and attempt to make our discussion approach something real.
Other useless labels:
-Liberal
-Conservative
-Right
-Left
And we have a tiered legal system which can be ignored when neccessary.
The us has not declared war since korea.
It didn’t even declare a war on itself when it attacked New York on 9/11. We all know that.
I agree with Jared. A pretense of democracy. Check out Greg Palast and blackboxvoting.org for a sense of how our elections don’t work.
But it’s representative democracy that has failed and always will fail.
Time to get a grasp of direct democracy. We have the technologies and the communities willing to try this. Why wait? Society is collapsing now. Those who have a plan will win.
Oh, I’m certainly in with you on that. Real democracy is what we should be striving for, and I’m not going to demean it the way Churchill did (although I think he was merely being whimsical). I’m passionately anti-fascist, and I agree we have devolved into a fascist corporatist state and we have to find our way out before the twilight of the gods comes if that’s possible, so what are we arguing about?
I really don’t remember, LOL.
What we have is essentially an oligarcy, I think – a government run by and for the wealthy. They are becoming incredibly wealthy in this game and this is nothing new. They have all the power. People as poor as they are are only thinking of how they will pay for christmas.
The mistake (I propose) that we make is in thinking that this is a mistake, or something new or that somehow “the people” will over-come. I suspect that in history that this has never occurred.
And if the people were somehow able to over-come it would quickly devolve into equivelant. The real answer would not be so simple.
Even now as bad as it is the people are very fragmented and attacking one another rather than the owners.
This occurs because the people dont know the real history and have no interest in learning it.
Jared, the people are fragmented by design. That’s all the media does now is herd people into two ideological camps and rage about how stupid the other echo chamber is.
These inhabitants of the propaganda chambers are going crazy because they’re being lied to, because their reality is being overlain with a false reality. And the partisan dems, in particular, have gotten super-addicted to their echo chamber.
Then there is the non-partisan group struggling to help their addicted friends learn about propaganda.
We perceive reality by how other people react to it.
I agree with you, Julie. We are reaping the wages of sin in blowback from our indiscriminate and perpetual wars.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/17/blowback-us-funded-ukraine-neo-nazis-mentor-us-white-supremacists/
I live in Texas. I already left a comment but want you to see this article, as it reinforces all you are saying.Border Petrol Agents get away with murder and worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/rape-texas-border-immigrants-esteban-manzanares.html
The comments, concerning various drugs, certainly have some validity for some of the shooting events that occur, but keep in mind that this focus on psych meds is a key meme being deliberately put forth to achieve some nefarious goals.
This focus opens the door to disarming anyone that is deemed ‘psychologically unstable’, which, as history shows, is easily abused, with the targets being anyone that disagrees with the goals of the state/corporate establishment.
This focus also is a convenient one to use as a cover for ‘false flag’ or hoax ‘shooting’ operations. The ‘Sandy Hook’ operation is the most blatant example of a hoax (nobody died or was shot) where the psych approach was used.
Yes, there is definitely a war culture in the US that heavily impacts the public in an adverse way, but it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that the organizations that perpetrate the ‘False Flags’ (9-11, Oklahoma City, etc, etc) and Hoaxes (Boston Bombing, Sandy Hook, etc, etc, where nobody was shot, injured or died) also use this fact as cover for their operations.
And let’s not forget about the use of MK Ultra programming by those same organizations to create shooters, when the object is to actually kill some people.
At this point there have been so many false flag and hoax mass shootings that one is remiss if they don’t initially react to any mass shooting with a skeptical response. They should be considered fake until proven real, just like so much of the other ‘news’ offered up by the MSM.
Maybe Caitlin could write a followup essay dealing with this in the future. I can’t imagine her shying away from the truth.
While I agree that we need to use healthy skepticism for much of the mainstream news, I believe that the false flags and hoaxes that you mention have been demonstrated to be fundamentally true.
Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point.
I think it means that dissent has both a good side and a bad side. On one hand, objective dissent has the potential for fixing problems. On the other side, it has to be balanced against spiraling into political instability and civil unrest which can tragically backfire when devised to support ulterior objectives.
The only domestic terrorist attacks I followed diligently were the theater in Aurora, the Boston Marathon, and the Las Vegas strip. All three had giant holes in the narratives. All three had shifting narratives. Someone even posted their police scanner recording for Aurora.
There is an obvious, very dark agenda going on. That’s why they should be called terrorist attacks, and not just when the accused perpetrators are foreign.
We are being conditioned to violence, to having no protection.
Cait, it’s the psych drugs. You have the uncanny ability to see through BS, so do your own research on this. You’ll find a prescription bottle behind
EVERY. SINGLE. MASS. SHOOTING.
https://www.cchr.org/videos/making-a-killing/
No exceptions. People didn’t do this kind of thing 100 years ago.
It started with the MK ULTRA program run by Paperclip Nazi scientists, I think. They were trying to find a way to create a perfect assassin that would kill robotically without remorse and then turn the gun on himself so he could never be interrogated by the “enemy.” Like The Manchurian Candidate. This involved use of heavy doses of psychiatric drugs, or LSD. Now they use them to create mass shooters to gin up support for stricter gun control laws, or create a strategy of tension keeping the public afraid, or anything else they need. They call it “mental health.”
“Name me one thing unique to America that could possibly explain its unique mass shooting problem besides the fact that the American psyche is necessarily pummeled with war propaganda day in and day out…”
I’ll name you two – which are different from Switzerland:
1. Lots more vets with PTSD
2. A hate-spewing president
Staged shootings.
Although I don’t think that’s unique to America. In the 1970s when I lived in southern France, the Red Brigades were engaged in terrorist acts in Italy. Decades later, I learned that the FBI was responsible for radicalizing people in this group and supplying them with explosives — for the usual reasons: entrapment and getting people to associate communism with violence.
US & White Helmets connection to terrorist training, supply of arms, now being exposed? Those who care about Syria need to listen! The TRUTH is now out!
https://www.themaven.net/facebookzoo/poached-publishers/https-youtu-be-dcu8mnc1jye-alhOmtH6yEO0BJzBZgBHFw/
A state continuously at war,
a populace in turmoil, pumped on fear, anger, and outrage, ….
driven to tribal factionalism
Manipulation and herding of the masses,
impoverishment, and citizen on citizen violence, are but two of the costs of the elites’ drive to sustain an unsustainable empire.
Living in a country that commits international mass murder and provides the ammo for others to commit mass murder takes its toll on a soul. Take note of recent posts regarding 500,000 killed in ‘war on terror’. As if war is not terror.
Over at WashingtonsBlog.com (another fantastic resource), David Swanson wrote another good essay on this subject. Everyone, please consider:
https://washingtonsblog.com/2018/11/a-tale-of-two-marines.html
So, wouldn’t they want to put our soldiers on the front lines on these psych meds in order to make them into more effective, ruthless, brutal war criminal killing machines in battle? In WWII there was a study showing that a lot of soldiers never fired their weapons. Are they doing that now? How could the military resist the urge to put them all on psych meds? Probably doing that. Then they come home and realize the terrible things they have seen and done and are haunted by their memories.
Based on your questions and answers thereto, I bet you’ll get a kick out of reading this entire interview:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/robert_sapolsky-toxo
Here’s the part I thought of in response to your comment:
Sapolsky: “You want to know something utterly terrifying? Here’s something terrifying and not surprising. Folks who know about Toxo and its affect on behavior are in the U.S. military. They’re interested in Toxo. They’re officially intrigued. And I would think they would be intrigued, studying a parasite that makes mammals perhaps do things that everything in their fiber normally tells them not to because it’s dangerous and ridiculous and stupid and don’t do it. But suddenly with this parasite on board, the mammal is a little bit more likely you go and do it. Who knows? But they are aware of Toxo.”
I love your writing, Miss Caitlin. I am a big fan!
YOu ask what factor other than war propoganda can be influencing the violence in the USA. Particularly in army vets. The massive poisoning of our population with neurotoxins is perennially overlooked. Mercury in particular which is well know to cause anxiety, depression and psychosis. Our service people are shot up to the gills with it….along with all kinds of experimnental stuff, too, apparently…..like Lariam.
Lead from bad water and the old housing stock in the inner cities causes lowered IQ and impulse control issues and violent outbursts. Our penitentiaries are filled with lead poisoned individuals.
Now we have all the new odd chemicals added to the soup. The endocrine disrupters which addle sexual expression. The kids who got socked full of mercury before it was (supposedly) removed from the pediatric vaccine schedule can’t excrete that stuff becasue Mercury puts at stop to any kind of efficient detoification processes.
Glyphosate appears to be no joke, either, as nobody can eat regular old bread anymore as their gut microbiome is all screwed up.
I think you are missing a big piece of the puzzle if you fail to take into account the mass poisoning of the population.
In any case, look for my book to appear soon, “The Mercury Detoxification Manual,” which I have cowriten with Andrew Hall Cutler Phd. Andy was a Cehmical Engineer with his degree from Princeton and wrote the two books “Amalgam Illness, Diagnosis and Treatment,” and “Hair Test Interpretation, Finding Hidden Toxicities, ” which are available at http://www.noamalgam.com
In fact it gets worse. People concerned about mass shootings call for “universal mental health screenings” starting with children, especially here in California after passage of Prop 63 in 2004, as the solution to finding people who might go on murderous gun rampages in the future. But look at the underhanded agenda that satisfies.
The next step in this insidious “solution” means psychiatrists putting kids they “screen” on more psych drugs, which will addict them for life to drugs that cause violence, and calls for more mental health screenings. A vicious circle of violence. They want to have a society where everyone is “mentally ill” and “needs medicine” to be “normal.” Brave New World.
patch wars=pysch ward
tell=yell.
Gotta get rid of spell check, tho the bad parentheses are mine, oops.
I mention above because Xanax is prescribed for PTSD often, as well as other conditions. Look up withdrawal stories.
I will read this post (and its comments) every day. Maybe it will bring peace to our house, if not the world. My spouse and I are exactly like the two sides fighting over control of the light switch. Yet, if we could listen to each other instead of shouting, we would discover that our basic concepts are very much alike.
I think you have overlooked a major potential explanation for the “mass shooting epidemic” and that is that these events are, in fact, propaganda in themselves. You mention how many shooters are former military, however a much higher percent of them have a connection, in one way or another, to the Fbi. Just surprised this wasn’t included in your article…that the shootings ARE the propaganda.
Another story from America’s dark side:
Lt Calley took the carbine
Shot some peasants, 49
And when he saw that they were dead
He filled 50 more with red-hot lead
(After being sentenced to life at hard labor by a military court martial, he received a pardon and the hand in marriage of a jewelry heiress.)
Great post again.
……..
The first thing, that comes to my mind, when I hear about another mass shooting in the USA: What would you expect from a country which was founded on the genocide of Native Americans (some 12 million) and the slave labor of kidnapped Africans.
……..
The second thought: Is there another country where the right to bear arms is written into the constitution? Are there other industrialized countries where visits to the shooting range are a national pastime, where there are frequent gun shows in even the smallest town, where ammunition can be bought at the supermarket?
……..
The third thought: Edward Bernays Public Relations, TV, Hollywood, the American frontier (Wild West), John Wayne riding into the sunset with a beautiful lady in his arms.
……..
The fourth thought: This is a brutal, unforgiving place. Death penalty, mass incarceration (2.2million), inequality, poverty, homelessness. No money for the disenfranchised, disabled, elderly, sick, but 700 billions (probably rather one trillion) a year for the biggest military machine that ever existed.
……..
Mass shootings are only one symptom of a society that is on the edge, that is a powder keg, where the social contract is constantly rewritten or invalidated by the powerful, where kindness, grace, empathy, respect are regarded as weakness.
……..
And yet, I have contacts with US inhabitants, which are the nicest people one can imagine, and they love their country. And I think of Upton Sinclair, Howard Zinn, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Pop Staples, Roberta Flack, Tina Turner, Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron. I could write down thousands of names from artists and writers which I deeply admire, people who made a significant contribution to world culture.
……..
Is there hope after all?
Yes, and don’t forget the weekly deluge of “COPS” on TV.
Well let’s see what is really different from the past and what is going on now. There have always been people with mental illness, and soldiers with PTSD. Guns were actually more available in the past than they are today in the USA to the point high schools would have shooting teams and kids would bring rifles to school. War propaganda has always been around jingoism is the norm for American media.
Perhaps it may be the SSRI drugs being prescribed to vets and youth at alarming rates. You know those drugs were the ads straight up tell you that “you may have thoughts of suicide”, ‘psychosis’, runny stools, and perhaps ‘death’.
Here is just one possible example.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/07/25/antidepressants-linked-murders-murderous-thoughts/
Remember when Bowling for Columbine came out and Moore drew the seemingly obvious connection between the high caliber slaughter of the students and the ubiquity of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et al in our culture? And we continue to pretend not to see it. Your essay is dead fukkin ON, and thank you for writing it.
Exactly what I’ve long been saying (and predicting) too, Caitlin Johnstone!
The war propaganda and evil militarization of American culture have normalized and even lionized “American Sniper” war murder so that it’s a given that an increasing number of emotionally vulnerable Americans will take their cue, under “leadership by example” in deciding that shooting up (or bombing or otherwise killing) other people, in acts of homicidal- suicidal violence, is an answer to their personal problems just as national leaders give speeches telling us bombing and war is the answer to our country’s problems. The otherwise senseless mass shootings and growing domestic terrorism taking place in the U.S. already quadrupled a couple years ago to the point that there is nearly one mass shooting every day (and that doesn’t count the other mass killings using different means). As Caitlin explains, neither mental illness nor availability of guns alone explain this phenomenon. Yet no politician or media beholden to sustaining the wars and war propaganda can mention this obvious factor. I predicted this problem at the outset of the Iraq War as it didn’t take an Einstein to see this was going to happen when the most significant prior “domestic terrorists” like Timothy McVeigh, the DC Sniper” John Muhammad and another veteran who shot up a hospital were all products of Gulf War l.
The war profiteers believe they can control the evil when they open Pandora’s Box to let loose the fear, hate, false pride and other emotional vices they use to manipulate otherwise good people to turn them into supporters of mass murder, i.e. war. The warhawk psychopaths think they can control these evil incitements they unleash to direct them only at foreigners but every mass murder incident taking place INSIDE the U.S. is proof such evils cannot be neatly directed but have a way of boomeranging back. Simply put, violence begets violence (even if when he gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama, having decided to escalate US wars, had to try and refute MLK Jr.’s wisdom). We are doomed to experience increasing violent chaos inside the U.S. as it’s simply more blowback from these first 17 years of perpetual war.
Thank you for organizing all the crap that has been spinning in my old brain, Caitlyn. Your articles are my rock. Rock on!!
It’s really not that complicated and the propaganda is not domestic. America and it’s creed citizenry are in the way. We have to be emasculated and balkanized if the NWO is to take birth.
Recently there were utube videos showing America’s number one ally–shooting innocent unarmed children, women, boys and men. The victims crime—they were protesting their loss of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our police forces are being trained and militarized by these people [https://newsok.com/article/feed/78556/nypd-detective-reports-to-work-from-tel-aviv]–why?–because as Chris Hedges once opined–we are all Gazans.
This real time genocide has been published and projected on our TVs for 70 years. Netanyahu comes to the US congressional chambers–without bothering to consult with the US president–and gets 29 standing ovations from the sycophants, who are suppose to be our representatives. What impact do you suppose that all of this condoned violence and genocide has had on the people of this country?
The impact–[as Dr. Jones concludes see attached video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeFnlWgTwhE%5D is–if you don’t like someone– you just kill him/ or her. What my Jewish brothers and sisters have to understand–is that this mind conditioning cuts both ways–and if anti-Judaism is on the rise–because of Israel’s abhorrent polices–than I can only say– beware–because the die is cast–and it was caste by your people.
Or, we [US citizens of all persuasions] get in front of the train wreck–defuse the many glowing bombs–and bring God [a higher power or intelligence] back into the equation. Many of us–[the majority who choose politics as a vocation]–are still not capable of operating in the world– without parental supervision–so it’s time for the citizen to step up to the plate–and start supervising!
The extreme right-wing Netanyahu government is giving all good Jewish people a bad name. You wonder if they will ever realize what they are doing.
Not very often you see a novel and valid take on an old problem, but this is one of them.
This is great except Noam is a bit of a gatekeeper, too, especially when it comes to the spectrum of acceptable opinion in regards to the events of September 11th, 2001.
Quite true. However, when he’s right he deserves credit. On the subject of gatkeeping, maybe it’s time to recognize that these mentally broken people who commit mass shootings are casualties of wars for Israel.
you make some very good points but I feel you have missed one of the major motivators for the many incidents of mass shootings and that is the high percentage who are either on or coming off Prescription Anti psychotic Meds
Add this to your brew and we may have a clue as to the reason.
thks for your insight
that was my point, exactly, too, Norman. Now that is spot on. And the more people think the solution is more mental health, the more they’re going to put people on more psych meds, which is the problem, not the solution
Good to see someone joining me on that essential point. But remember, that is outside the scope of acceptable debate, even here apparently!
This site from CCHR documents what we are talking about, Norman. It is real. People here should take careful note.
https://www.cchrint.org/2017/10/10/another-mass-shooting-another-psychiatric-drug/
So getting disturbed people to “mental health” as if that were the solution, is exactly the wrong solution that will definitely make things worse, but that’s all we’re supposed to talk about.
It’s also about manufacturing consent for gun control legislation but that will only make things worse, too.
Slam f*%#ing dunk, Caitlin! Just utterly brilliant. You go, girl! You’re one of the most astute voices out there, both in what you have to say, and in your spot-on, laser-perfect way of expressing it.
Almost.spot on… see my criticism.
The most demonic limitation on debates is like this one where we are never supposed to say anything about psych meds like Prozac and Xanax causing violence and suicide leading traumatized vets and school kids to commit mass shootings because they all dull empathy. This debate is fiendishly twisted. The assumption is that mental health is inherently good, that psychs know what they are doing, that we need more of it, not less, yet the reality is that they are just pushing the very drugs that lead to the violence! So all more mental health would do is lead to more violence and more drugs and more violence and so on. But we’re not supposed to ever talk about that.
and meanwhile, Big Pharma gets spectacularly rich and fat from sales of these poisonous drugs they know cause violence, that every case of mass shootings investigated to date has uncovered abuse of these drugs prescribed by psychs, doctors prescribing them get big kickbacks, while product liability lawsuits award millions to patient-victims and their families leading them to be withdrawn from the market in some cases like Risperdal, that the whole system of psychiatry is psychotic, unscientific and subjective. But, there I go again, talking about something I shouldn’t have brought up, so I’m sorry. Go back to talking about the importance of more mental health.
Anecdotally, I knew someone who is a VERY nice, normal person and never had violent tendencies who was prescribed Xanax during a physical health treatment (the treatment caused anxiety). After the successful therapy, he was told tapering off Xanax was the only safe withdrawal, as suddenly stopping is potentially deadly.
during the year of tapering, his wife had to call the police on him a half dozen times and he agreed with the police to go to the emergency patch wars on one occasion because he realized the taper was causing severe anger, rage, crazy thinking, violent mood swings, hours long rants at his family, etc. His son stopped him from attacking his mother more than once, and they also became physical about minor issues (the father would harangue and tell and just go on for hours, pushing every button in the son). I saw him on some occasions, he had a look in his eyes of a lunatic, very scary indeed (I didn’t learn of the home problems until afterward, or I would have done more, but his wife is lucky she isn’t accidentally dead (I say that because he just wasn’t in control, I doubt he would have meant to kill her, but while in these rages, he would throw things, lunge at her, make her sit & listen to his rambling tirades, etc).
I agree about some psych meds. Xanax, and I hear Valium, too, are SERIOUS mood altering meds, esp. when reduced on purpose or if unavailable or an rx is denied.
patch wars=pysch ward
tell=yell.
Gotta get rid of spell check, tho the bad parentheses are mine, oops.
I mention above because Xanax is prescribed for PTSD often, as well as other conditions. Look up withdrawal stories.
People I know on Xanax say it’s absolutely impossible to get off of it, having tried for years. Once you’re hooked, you’re done. While you’re on it, they call them “happy pills” which inhibit feelings of empathy or caring for others.
Does T***p take ’em? Would explain a lot.
Yes, I think he probably does.
It is indeed sad that an Australian needs to remind Americans about their blindness to war. W
Some of us Americans remind Americans, too.
Libertarians are anti-war. Greens are anti-war. This tiny minority speaks up constantly about it.
For instance, I believe that the inertia surrounding our obsolete use of fossil fuels is primarily due to the insane profits being made in the war & arms industries. If we move to the cutting edge energy technologies, it will be a double whammy for war and arms profiteers. Arms include the domestic supply as well as the military supply.
Thus the need for constant gaslighting of the partisans. In order to get their consent for the constant brutality and violence, you gotta make people crazy to the point where they can’t think for themselves.
Another taboo subject ties in to all this: war emits greenhouse gases. If you allow regular people to notice this, the democratic rank-and-file will revolt against war.
One of your best! Chomsky’s quotation is priceless. It explains the propensity of people to become sheeple.