Looking in the Wrong Direction Again

And still they Talk, and Still They Miss the Point

 

I have had to keep turning the radio off, during the news. I just get so cross, listening to BBC reporters assuming that the only issue at stake in the Connecticut tragedy is ‘gun control’.  I’ve said many times before that I don’t myself wish to own or use a gun. I have seen in detail what they can do.  But I also agree with the drafters of the English Bill of Rights (1689) and its American imitator a century later that a state monopoly of firearms is a bad thing, and is usually desired by despots. Of course this is more naturally obvious, and easier to understand,  in a largely rural culture, where a lot of people will have firearms in the natural course of events.

 

But as I ceaselessly point out, the gun laws of Great Britain before 1920 were so relaxed that they made Texas look effeminate, and the record shows ( see my ‘A Brief History of Crime’) that the widespread availability of legal guns in the late Victorian and Edwardian era was not accompanied by widespread use of them in crimes. Most of the few firearms incidents of the time (especially the notorious ‘Siege of Sydney Street’ )involved foreign political activists, and were quite unconnected with the general level of crime in this country. It is also always worth mentioning Switzerland, where almost every home contains a legal gun and ammunition thanks to that admirable nation’s long tradition of securing its independence through a well-trained citizen army.

Gun crime in Switzerland has always been, and still is, negligible.

 

There is no doubt that in some place and under some circumstances, the USA is a more violent culture than any in Western Europe. One could spend years discussing this, but would end up acknowledging that this is just one the ways in which the USA differs from other countries and cultures. Its history of frontier anarchy, slavery, segregation, and pioneering may have something to do with, as well as its often unintegrated and poorly-policed big cities.

 

By the way, an important fact that needs to borne in mind when studying American statistics is that a large number of gun deaths in the US are in fact suicides. I am not qualified to say how many of those involved, in another country, would have used another method and how many would have remained alive. I just think it’s necessary to recognise this. In 2010 the USA experienced 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. It casts a slightly different light on the totals and I wish it was mentioned more often. By the way, gun suicides among the young appear to be on the increase, which may be connected with the more widespread prescription of ‘antidepressants’ and other psychotropic drugs to the young. It may also be connected with the widespread use of cannabis, which seems to me to be under heavy suspicion of destroying the reason of some of its users.

 

 

My own experience of living in the USA, an affluent suburb of Washington DC (actually in the State of Maryland)

was entirely peaceful, probably more crime-free than any part of this country. A few miles away, in North-East DC, the nights resounded with the crackle of gunfire as (this was the early 1990s) the drug gangs battled with each other for supremacy. The gun battles all took place within the District of Columbia, which in theory had some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Neighbouring Virginia, which had some of the most relaxed gun laws ( an acquaintance, a Virginia State Prosecutor who never knew when she might meet one of her prosecutees, carried a pistol in her hand bag as a matter of course, but was careful to leave it at home when she headed into Washington. She had no reason to suppose that her potential assailants would be so scrupulous, but law enforcers can’t choose which laws they obey) , had by contrast much less gun crime. One of the many problems with gun laws, not much mentioned by their advocates, is precisely how they might be enforced. In a free country, it would be very difficult. And,a s the District of Columbia has found, the people who can most reliably be expected to evade gun laws are criminals.

 

These are all facts. Gun law enthusiasts, confronted with them, either flatly ignore them or become empurpled with moral superiority and start calling me rude names or claiming that I am a survivalist or want an armed populace.  This is a pity, as I suspect both I and they want the same thing, namely fewer murders, and especially fewer murders of defenceless children.

 

It’s been put to me that , whatever motivated the killer of Sandy Hook, the availability in his home of powerful firearms was part of the cause of what then happened. I completely agree.  In Britain, or an equally or more  gun-controlled country such as Germany or Finland, it would have been harder for the killer to do his crime.

 

Yet, as we see, comparable crimes have taken place in Britain (Hungerford and Dunblane) in Germany ( the Erfurt School murder) and Finland (Jokela and Kauhajoki). The question is what we can practically do to prevent these events, and which is the most preventable cause. But that is not the only flaw in this argument. Knowing what we know about the huge number of guns in the USA, if availability were the decisive issue, then we would see massacres of this kind almost every day. But we do not. What we really badly need to know is what influences the killers to pick up the gun and , above all, to point it at a fellow-creature and squeeze the trigger with the aim of destroying life.

 

None of these actions is remotely rational.  In most cases, the desire for celebrity can only be a posthumous one since so many of these people kill themselves or intend and expect to be killed by the police. Quiet why any sane person could hope to be famous after his death, for a mass murder, I am not sure. Usually, most if not all the victims are barely known to the perpetrator. Yet individual madness is, or was, very rare until recently. Crowd madness is another thing, but for a lone person to go mad, some major external force is usually necessary. Sometimes it is unbearable grief or horror, as in those traumatised by war. Sometimes it is physical damage to the brain, or the effect of a tumour or other growth within the skull.

 

In the case of the severe outbreak of so-called ‘Dementia Praecox’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I have heard it suggested that it was at least partly the consequence of the dangerous amounts of lead then found in food-packaging, household paints and plumbing. I was once told a curious story by the owners of a fine Victorian house in a small Georgia town, a bed-and-breakfast guest house, where I stayed the night. They said the house had been remarkably cheap because it had a reputation locally as a ‘suicide’ house, where owner after owner killed himself. When they renovated the building, they found that all the plumbing was made of lead, and stripped it out right back to the mains.

 

It seems to me to be quite within the bounds of possibility that many of our modern epidemics, including suicide among the young, could be caused by things they eat or drink, and that powerful chemicals, increasingly used to dose the ‘hyperactive’, ‘depressed’ ‘bipolar’ etc etc  might be the problem. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is so.

 

Now, it will be said that 99.99% of those who take these drugs do not commit mass killings. And, thank heaven, this is so. But if a small proportion do, and it turns out that these drugs caused the insanity which brought about the killing, then we can act in various ways, notably by monitoring those prescribed with such drugs more carefully, and keeping them away from firearms as a matter of course.

 

But if we find out that perhaps hundreds of the users of such drugs commit or attempt suicide, or suffer various other unpleasant reactions and side-effects. And if we discover (as we undoubtedly have ) that many antidepressants, tested by their own makers, are no more effective than placebos, then the users of these pills, and society as a whole, may be paying a high price for nothing at all. In two cases known to me, the prescription of such drugs (in one case to a young woman being stalked by a violent boyfriend, and getting no help from the police, who was not ‘depressed’ but reasonably frightened and unhappy, in another to a man whose wife had just died after a long and painful illness through which he had nursed her) was idiotic and was followed by various forms of misery.

 

This is why I call repeatedly for an inquiry into this issue.

 

 

Whatever the truth, we will not find it by refusing to look for it. I repeat, as I fear I shall have to do again, this catalogue of known facts. We would know more if we asked the right questions, but the media obsession with ‘gun control’ means that we often don’t.

 

Anders Breivik , the Norweigian mass killer, was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals. In his case, the substances were an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz. Anabolic steroids were also used heavily by David Bieber, who killed one policeman and tried to kill two more in Leeds in 2003, and by Raoul Moat, who shot three people in Northumberland, killing one and blinding another, who later tired of life and killed himself, so adding to Moat’s crimes.

 

Steroids are strongly associated with mood changes, uncontrollable anger and many other problems. In my view, this link remains formally unproven only because no great effort has yet been made to prove it. A serious worldwide inquiry should be launched into the correlation between steroid use and violent incidents.

Likewise with so-called ‘antidepressants’, whose medical value has recently been seriously questioned in two devastating articles in The New York Review Of Books by the distinguished American doctor Marcia Angell. Her words ought to be reproduced and circulated to all doctors.

 

I pointed out some time ago how many shooting incidents involved people who had been taking these suspect pills. Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’. So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981. They were also found in the cabin of the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine massacre culprits had been taking a powerful antidepressant. (Washington Post, 29th April 1999, confirmed by FoI inquiry by Peter Breggin, autopsy showed ‘therapeutic levels’) . There were traces of it in his body. We simply don’t know if his accomplice, Dylan Klebold, had been taking such medication. His medical records, apparently, are sealed. I cannot think why this should be the case, but apparently it is. Can anyone explain?  

 

Then there are the dangerous illegal drugs that are increasingly common since the State stopped bothering to prosecute users, or even (in many parts of the US) to accept ludicrous claims that smoked or eaten marijuana can be medically valuable. Jared Loughner, who smiled so beatifically (like the equally unhinged Breivik) after murdering six people in Arizona, had been a heavy smoker of cannabis for much of his youth. The use of this allegedly ‘soft’ drug is increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, often severe.

 

It is hard to get clear information on this, but the author of the Virginia Tech school shootings, Cho Seung-Hui may also have been taking drugs for “depression.” He certainly had done so in the past, and there are those who believe that effects of these drugs are persistent, and there is evidence that ceasing to take them abruptly may trigger episodes of unreason.

An inquiry, that's all I ask for.