Theorising Without Data

Sherlock Holmes always said that it was a capital error to speculate about events when you lacked the information. But sometimes the data are just elusive. Should I then speculate anyway, like all the people who are blaming easy access to guns for the Aurora killing, when Americans have had easy access to guns for centuries, but this sort of killing is comparatively new? Or should I just ask ‘Why don’t we have any data on this yet ?’ And if I do, will I be told off for even suggesting it might be important to have such? Probably, if I know my pro-drug contributors as well as I think I do.  Here goes anyway.

I have only just learned ( for instance) from my friend and colleague Mary Ellen Synon (who has written about this subject elsewhere on Right Minds) , that the Oklahoma City mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh, was a heavy user of drugs – methamphetamine and cannabis.

This was revealed by Michael Fortier,  one of McVeigh’s accomplices. He was himself a drug user, and introduced McVeigh to his vices.  

I had expected to find evidence of this kind , as my theory - that a large number of such killings are undertaken by people who have been unhinged by legal or illegal drugs – would suggest that McVeigh was likely to have such a thing in his past. Current use isn’t always the problem. Past use can have unhinged the person for good.  But it is only thanks to Mary Ellen’s diligent digging that I have discovered this about McVeigh.

Liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic are always anxious to rush off in their favourite direction – ‘gun control’, when there is a horrible mass murder . You can see why they do this. They think all rural Americans are homicidal hillbilly gun nuts who need to be controlled, and miss no opportunity to call for this. Rural Americans, in return, regard urban liberals as effeminate milksops who have no idea what America is for, and laugh at their concerns.

Since researching the facts of the matter for a controversial chapter in my much-disliked and widely-unbought book ‘A Brief History of Crime’ I have been stuck with the awkward knowledge that, if you don’t like guns (and as it happens I dislike them a lot, being myself a suburban milksop and poltroon who has seen the results of gunfire on the human frame), universal gun control is a completely useless way of keeping them out of the hands of bad people.

Judged purely on reason and facts, the rural hillbillies and the National Rifle Association are in the right, and the degree-draped New York liberals are clueless, and have never really thought about the matter because they are so sure that they possess the high ground. The hillbillies may not have thought about it  either, but it doesn’t make them any less correct. The right to bear arms is a guarantee of liberty, as recognised in our own Bill of Rights in 1689,  and guns don’t fire themselves.  People fire them. What’s more, this country’s gun laws, before 1820, made Texas look soppy. And pre-1920 Britain was not raked with lawless gunfire. Far from it.

But back to McVeigh for a moment. When I wrote an article about his execution some years ago, I read a thumping great biography of him, and I cannot recall there being any mention of drugs. If there was, it was in passing and not stressed or linked to his behaviour. Likewise, Anders Breivik’s willingly-given details of his use of drugs were given a passing mention in his swirling ‘manifesto’. And while all kinds of other loopy psychobabble/ psycho-political theories about how a silly fat loner became a mass murderer have been done to death, I know of nobody apart from me who has ever explored this factor.

Nobody is interested. The connection (despite the many extraordinary coincidences, in cases of mass shooting and the use of drugs by the shooter, from Columbine onwards) is just not made by the media.  Why is this? Partly it’s because of the gun control hobby horse, which satisfies the immediate demand for analysis, and which makes media executives happy. Is it also partly because so many media people are taking legal or illegal drugs themselves, and are unwilling to wonder if these things may have dangers? I don’t know.

But so far (and this has happened in several of the recent US shootings) there is *no hard information at all* on this subject.  It is not that we know that Holmes didn’t take any kind of drugs. It is not that we know he did. We don’t know if he did or he didn’t, because the media present haven’t pressed the question, and because the authorities haven’t, apparently thought it worthwhile to look into it. 

And to this day most people don’t know that McVeigh and Breivik were messing with their minds by swallowing or otherwise ingesting powerful substances which could have affected their minds. It just hasn’t been treated as important. That doesn’t mean it isn’t. We often look in the wrong place for our explanations, as medical science attests down the ages. Leech, anyone? Pre-frontal lobotomy?

One curious thing has been reported about James Holmes.  A car in the family’s San Diego driveway, believed to belong to his parents,  bore a sticker with the words ‘To Write Love on her Arms’. This is the name of a Florida-based charity said to work on ‘issues of depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide’.  Holmes was also a student of ‘neuroscience’ , a branch of knowledge often linked with the advocacy of drugs for alleged conditions such as ‘ADHD’ ‘ADD’ and ‘Clinical Depression’. But that’s all I know. I want to know more.  So should you. So should my media colleagues, and the police, and those who are interested in preventing any more of these ghastly events. It might be important. And it is important to know if it is, or if it isn’t. We won’t get there by not asking. So, can someone in Colorado please ask? And keep asking?