The UK "Used" to have a "Free Public Health Service" but the Hidden from public scrutiny Parasites who "REALLY Own/Control" the World have purposely run-down this service so the "Zionist/Jewish Controlled Government will eventually say that they Have to "Privatise" this service and I guarantee you I know Who will Take-Over! If you really want to "Wake-UP" and know how these Hidden Parasites work, then type in: "The Zionist Gang that bankrupted General Motors!" It's Time to "Wake-UP" to the TRUTH
While I agree with much of this documentary, Moore is presenting a very innacurate picture of the Canadian ghettos. He should've taken a look at Vancouver and the surrounding area.
Best quote from this documentary: "if more guns make people safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world.....it isn't...it's the opposite". Common sense makes sense.
@bukowski1950 She was scared because she thought she could hurt the girl more. Did you never hear that sometimes when somebody is injured moving them can make things worse? Imagine you were in that position, the woman must've been mortified.
@mrsiwtv Yea,i heard.Thats when you suspect person hs damaged/broken spine or neck.Not when someone get shot.When someone get shot you FIRST look where the bullet entered,than stop the bleeding.Not "Im too scared,dont know where she's hit,im too scared to touch/roll her".Only stupid bitch can react like this.And even worse is that its grown woman,and teacher also.
@bukowski1950 Cut the woman some slack, a little girl has just been shot in front of her. Do you think they really get prepared for cases like this at elementary school? And still, what if the bullet had damaged the spine, I mean the girl was tiny. And are you honestly accusing the woman of letting the girl die on purpose?
in from scotland- its plain and simple, the black communities in america have went thro and are going thro the same as the irish did in scotland and still do to this day. i say to my black friends in the states. KEEP THE FAITH- WE SHALL OVERCOME!
Charlton Heston is such a disrespectful asshole!!! I can't believe someone could have such an extreme lack of morals. Absolutely disgusting and disgraceful human being. I hope he dies in an ironic matter: getting shot...by his own gun
@infinitelimitation majority white people my ass. I live in canada and trust me when i say it is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world
@infinitelimitation wot r u saying it is blacks who cause the problems!!!! coz i can tell u now that it the whites who do the hurting and the blacks who get the pain and the blame!!
canadians know manners and how to beat the living shit out of their fucking kids - and it must be nice to trust ur government - much respect to canada , and they know how to keep their nose out of other countries bullshit - american government just uses citizens like little stupid tax paying sheep , herds of cattle to fund thier wars - and it pisses us off , so kill a politician ! not each other , know your true enemy
So what these retards are stating is that we should have universal health care for bangers, so when they get shot they get healed up all nice and can go out and do more shit fuckin up the country and be debt free??? You need to work for what you get, no free rides
yeah free health care in canada! also lawsuits arent existant in canada too! BUT.... the income tax is pretty harsh i hear....canada is still pretty boss though...
lol! This is so true! I'm glad we don't just shoot people. My aunt was sneaking home one night through the window of my Grandad's house to escape a nasty boyfriend. Grandad heard someone come in, and he had a glass paperweight in hand to scare them off. Luckily he didn't have a gun, or my aunt could have been killed by her own father.
@TheFireheart Or maybe if your aunt had a weapon, she could've just defended herself from the nasty fucker instead of running away!!!!!!!! You make no sense. Obviously there are going to be irresponsible people with weapons but the overall benefit to society cannot be replaced.
hey guess what, Vancouver is the BEST CITY IN THE WORLD....Toronto is number 4 and Calgary is 5....and the first american city that you see in the list is Honolulu, which is like 27...
the only time my parents purposely locked the door, was to prove me a point, which was to not to stay up late....i got used to it so, so i'd unlock the window or something before i leave.......
@MrMiamiswaggz305, uh, the NRA does not sell weapons. They’re a political advocacy group, not a manufacturing group. Their only source of income is membership fees and donations.
The best thing about Canada is our free health care. The worst is our winters :( I think we are a bit more laid back then the Americans, but there are still murders being commited over here, and a couple of school shootings in the past as well. Good documentary though.
Speaking from an outsiders point of view, there really is no way for even he most patriotic American to dispute any of this. The gun murder statistic alone is enough to prove that something has to chance very soon. And for anyone who tries to argue with this, even if you look at that figure PER HEAD, its still over 600% more than the average figure in Europe.
@adam0900909 No, its not gun ownership. Its the fearmongering coorporate media who pump fear into people. Moore used the controll subject of Canada who own guns but dont have the media perpetuating fear. They are breaking society apart from within. Divide and conquer.
@adam0900909: "The gun murder statistic alone is enough to prove that something has to chance very soon. And for anyone who tries to argue with this, even if you look at that figure PER HEAD, its still over 600% more than the average figure in Europe."
You just showed one way that Moore "cooked" the statistics — by using raw counts, when anyone who knows even the BASICS of statistics knows to use PER CAPITA ("per head" as you put it) when comparing different-sized populations.
But that wasn't the ONLY way he "cooked" them. He "cooked" them an ADDITIONAL TWO OTHER WAYS that I know of (and can prove). And, he OUTRIGHT LIED about what the statistics represent!
He said, "How many people are killed EACH YEAR by guns?" That is NOT what those statistics represent. For that, he'd have to've used a WEIGHTED AVERAGE of SEVERAL THEN-RECENT YEARS, and they'd have to be the SAME years for ALL nations. They'd also ALL have to be from MEDICAL sources, counting ALL gun deaths.
Yet, Moore not only did NOT do that (thus invalidating what he said that the statistics are) and only used ONE year of each nation, he used DIFFERENT years for the different nations. He very deliberately used one of the WORST years in then-recent USA history, and compared it to some of the BEST years in then-recent histories of the other nations (Australia's law enforcement website said that the year he used for them was their second-best EVER!!).
You see, on his own website, he says where he got the statistics in an attempt to defend them. He doesn't mention the different years thing — I had to find that out by tracking them back to their sources. But what he DID admit (without pointing out the significance, of course) was that the sources for most of the nations OTHER THAN the USA was from their LAW ENFORCEMENT agencies (FBI equivalent). But did he use FBI figures for the USA? NO!! He used the Center for Disease Control (CDC)!
Now WHY is this significant? Because LAW ENFORCEMENT figures only count deaths from gun CRIMES (homicides, etc.)! But CDC (or equivalent health organizations in other nations) aren't concerned with WHY a person was shot to death. They count ALL deaths caused by high-speed chunks of lead, REGARDLESS of the reason!
By using CDC figures for the USA (ALL gun deaths) and comparing them with the LAW ENFORCEMENT agency figures for other nations (ONLY gun CRIME deaths), of COURSE the USA looks worse.
Moore could very easily have used the FBI figures for the USA (they're readily available on the FBI website, and were at the time of B4C as well), but he did not. He could also have used health stats for the other nations, but mostly he did not. He could've used stats for the same years, and made a weighted average, and used per capita figures instead of raw counts, but he did none of those things either.
That's THREE DIFFERENT WAYS that Moore "cooked" the statistics.
Does the USA have a problem with gun deaths? Yes, yes it does. Even if you "uncook" the statistics, the USA still comes out worse than the other nations Moore mentioned, but not by NEARLY as much. And not the worst of ALL nations — not by a LONG shot. We're only #8 overall in PER CAPITA GUN homicides, and #24 in per capita homicides overall REGARDLESS of weapon type (and really, does it matter? If your loved one is murdered, s/he's just as dead regardless of whether it was a gun, knife, etc.).
But merely having the USA be only SOMEWHAT worse than a handful of cherry-picked other nations wouldn't've fit Moore's needs. You see, he changed the POINT of the movie in the middle of making it, because of 9/11! We know this from his own website: mere days later, he wrote that he'd been making "a documentary on gun violence in America, but the worst-ever mass murder in U.S. history has just taken place without a single bullet being fired! ... Boxcutters! I can't get over it! ...
(continuing the quote from Moore's article on his own website):
"Boxcutters! I can't get over it! A THOUSAND GUN-CONTROL LAWS would not have prevented this tragedy! WHAT AM I DOING!?"
Actually, had Moore researched further, he'd've seen that "a thousand gun-control laws would not have prevented" ANY of the TOP FIVE mass murders (by body count) on U.S. soil in U.S. history — not ONE BULLET was fired at any person in ANY of them! This INCLUDES the worst SCHOOL massacre, BTW! But I digress...
Anyway, back to my point: 9/11 was a "wake-up call" to Moore. Up until then, he had just been making this movie as an anti-gun, anti-NRA, and anti-Charlton Heston diatribe. But after that, he felt that he had to give it some deeper purpose, and that was when he tacked on all of the "Culture of Fear" stuff. He kept much of the footage, though, such as his shamefully deceptive interview with Heston at the end.
Too bad he didn't do what he SHOULD'VE done. People DIED because he didn't.
"Now WHY is this significant? Because LAW ENFORCEMENT figures only count deaths from gun CRIMES (homicides, etc.)! But CDC (or equivalent health organizations in other nations) aren't concerned with WHY a person was shot to death. They count ALL deaths caused by high-speed chunks of lead, REGARDLESS of the reason!"
Lead flies at high speeds in cases that aren't someone shooting another person? DOES OBAMA KNOW ABOUT THIS?
@Hashashin001, yes, it does happen. Suicide and accidental self-shootings are two examples just off the top of my head that do not involve one person shooting another.
But my point was that there are other cases where one person DOES shoot another, that still aren't gun CRIMES. Examples include police action, self defense, and other justifiable homicides.
The law enforcement stats Moore referenced for, say, Germany, EXPLICITLY say that they EXCLUDE ALL those things. The CDC stats INCLUDE them.
Do you see how that is NOT an apples-to-apples comparison, if you compare JUST a SUBSET of gun deaths in other nations to ALL of the gun deaths in the USA?
Moore did this DELIBERATELY. He could just as easily have used the health agency numbers for the other nations, OR he could've used the FBI stats for the USA, putting both on equal playing fields. The USA would still have come out worse — but not so OVERWHELMINGLY worse. And without THAT, his movie had no POINT.
@COMALiteJ What? That is bullshit. The figures are accurate estimates. There are other criticisms to do with the film, yes, but this was not one of them. We are all aware that the USA is much bigger than the other countries in Europe so the count will obviously be higher - but how can you compare the gun crime in Canada to the US? Its ridiculous! Even if he HAD done this ridiculously, Americans need to realise how fucking stupid they are being making guns so accessible.
@likeastarbaby, no, it is not B.S. The figures are not "estimates" at all. They're very much real statistics, from real sources. Moore tells where he got them on his own Website. He does not say which years, though, so I tracked them back further to their actual sources. The figures are mostly exact. But they are used HIGHLY misleadingly, and the way he uses them makes the question he asked, that they supposedly answer, a LIE.
@likeastarbaby, say, for instance, that you own a service station, and I drive into it, and say to you, "Why are you charging $2.399 a gallon? The service station in the town a few miles up the road was charging only 67.9¢ per gallon!"
You say, "What!? I checked them, and I'm competitive with them!"
"No, I said that they WERE charging only 67.9¢ per gallon. In the late 1960s."
My numbers in that example would be accurate, but misleadingly used — not a fair comparison.
@COMALiteJ And you said yourself that even if they were used accurately, America would still come out worse. A lot worse. Hes just trying to home in the point. Also I don't have the effort or patience to research the actual figures, but as far as I'm aware the gun-related death values actually were accurate, as there is a list of criticism of BFC and that was not one of the inaccuracys that was highlighted.
@likeastarbaby: "And you said yourself that even if they were used accurately, America would still come out worse. A lot worse."
I did NOT say "A lot worse." I said that we'd come out worse than MOORE'S CHERRY-PICKED LIST OF NATIONS.
I never said that his statistics were INACCURATE. I said that they were USED MISLEADINGLY — a very different thing. It's called "lying with statistics," and why Mark Twain said that there were "liars, d_mn_d liars, and statisticians."
@COMALiteJ You didn't say a lot worse, I did. And those 'cherry picked list of Nations' are all main countries of Western society. Its not like he chose random, unknown places and chucked them in to keep his figures. Lets be honest, the difference in figures between Canada and America alone were immense, not to mention the difference between Europe and America.
@COMALiteJ So you're arguing that the figures aren't actually estimates, they're real values? Surely that makes it look even worse for the US? In this documentary, its obvious that Moore slightly overdramatises, exaggerates and misleads audiences, but despite all that, recieved overwhelmingly positive praise for BFC. And this is because he makes a very real and very necessary point. I'm not going to chuck around a few dodgy figures to belittle or ignore his message.
@likeastarbaby: "So you're arguing that the figures aren't actually estimates, they're real values? Surely that makes it look even worse for the US?"
I tell the truth (unlike Moore), even when it may not be the best thing for my PoV. The statistics are real and accurate, from legitimate sources, but they're cherry-picked and "cooked" in three different ways, so that they convey an extremely misleading conclusion in the minds of the viewers.
@COMALiteJ Sorry, got a bit mixed up there. The values are real, I meant misleading. I just think the pros outweigh the cons too much to be upset about him manipulating data. But I get that some people find doing things like that sneaky and facist.
@likeastarbaby: "I just think the pros outweigh the cons too much to be upset about him manipulating data."
Really? Considering that if he had done what he should've done, and blew the lid off of the REAL cause of the modern rash of school shootings (note that I've not yet told you just what that is — patience, young padawan! I'm going somewhere with this!), the Virginia Tech. rampage would very likely have been thwarted before it began? Cho was a textbook case (as were Dylan and Klebold).
@COMALiteJ What is the real case you're talking about? As far as I know, they haven't found the real, magic answer to why people commit homocide...apart from depressive tendencys and psychological problems? And I think the problem with stopping the person rather than the weapon is that 'textbook cases' may not always be that. You can't force help on someone who refuses it, and in either case someone who expresses schitzophrenia/depression/social anxiety may not be homocidal.
@likeastarbaby: "And this is because he makes a very real and very necessary point. I'm not going to chuck around a few dodgy figures to belittle or ignore his message."
And what is that "real and necessary point" and "message"? That America is super-violent because of a "culture of fear"? Guess what? That was NOT the original point of the movie. He tacked that on after 9/11 demolished his original point by killing thousands of people without a single bullet (and admitted it on his website).
@COMALiteJ No. I didn't really pick up on the 'culture of fear' stuff too much (this is where it started to get partly irrelevant), except I entirely agree that that is why American's have built up a society where keeping a gun is necessary. The point was about gun culture. I wouldn't think too much into the other stuff, because it was just padding and overdramatising, in order to home his opinion's to his target audience. And whether he lied or not, it did work.
You see, that's the thing: he originally intended this to be just an anti-gun, anti-NRA, anti-Charlton Heston, and somewhat anti-USA screed. He kept those parts even after his wake-up call.
Had he done what he SHOULD'VE done, namely, sat back and re-evaluated what he was doing, and looked for the REAL cause of the school shooting spree (which, BTW, would've been RIGHT UP HIS ALLEY, and which he later AGREED WITH on video!), Cho would likely have been thwarted before his V.T. rampage.
@COMALiteJ I see where you're coming from on this. I actually didn't think that most of this movie was even about Columbine, but just gun crime. Would'a, should'a, could'a. Speaking of Cho...what was his weapon of choice again? Hmm.
@likeastarbaby, my point in bringing up Cho is that the underlying cause of his rampage was the same as that for Dylan and Klebold, for at least one of the two Jonesboro killers, for Kip Kinkle, and also for the perpetrator of the single worst school massacre in U.S. history, whose body count equals that of BOTH Columbine AND Virginia Tech. COMBINED!
I speak of the Bath School Disaster of May, 1927. It doesn't get talked about as much.
Guess how many bullets were fired at people in that?
@COMALiteJ That was the one with the kids, right? I'm still not seeing the connection because their underlying causes...if you could explain? Lol. As far as I remember they never found a solid reason for Kip Kinkle, and Dylan and Klebold have been debated back and forth from depression to bullying. And the Bath perpertrator was an adult, wasn't it? They tend to do more damage, but psychological problems are harder to trace and monitor than in minors who are in a school environment...
@likeastarbaby, rather than give you the answer outright, let me show you the things that Moore should've noticed, and likely would've had he not been so busy libeling the NRA and Heston:
As of the time B4C was made, EVERY premeditated school shooting spree since the current rash started on Feb. 2, 1996 (more on that later) was perpetrated by middle-class (or higher) white youth, in middle-class (or higher) communities. Gee, why didn't the author of "Stupid White Men" NOTICE *THIS*!?
Think about THAT for a minute: conventional wisdom would expect that if such things were to happen, they'd be more likely to happen in poorer communities, inner city slums, "da 'Hood," and the like, right? But that's not what happened! The 180° DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE happened!
(Note: I'm talking here specifically about school shooting SPREES, with multiple RANDOM targets, not one-on-one murders that just happened to take place at a school [e.g. Kayla Rowland's murder in Flint].)
The reason I'm focusing on the killing SPREES is because they're the really strange statistical spike. One-on-one murders have been happening since Cain vs. Abel (for the Bible believers out there), and while such things are certainly evil (especially when kids are involved, either as victims, perpetrators, or both), otherwise normal people going on sudden rampages and RANDOMLY killing MULTIPLE people who did them no wrong is a WHOLE 'NOTHER LEVEL of evil entirely!
Anyway, notice WHERE these incidents occurred: Littleton, NOT Denver. Pearl, MS., NOT Jackson. Small town and suburbs, NOT big inner cities. Mostly upper middle-class.
Whenever one of these things happened, news crews would focus on some Pillar of the Community type who'd be wringing his hands and moaning, "B-b-but, this is such a NICE, PEACEFUL community! These things DON'T HAPPEN here!"
Excuse ME, Mr. Pillar, but such communities were the ONLY places where "these things" DID happen!!
Next up, the timing. Notice I said earlier that the rash began on Feb. 2nd, 1996? That was the Moses Lake, Washington incident. Prior to that, there were less than one such incident per DECADE! There was one with a white girl perpetrator in the mid-1970s, and before that the Texas University Sniper of 1966, and before that? Well, the Bath School Massacre of 1927!
AFTER that? A mere two years later, there were multiple such incidents in one DAY! TWICE! TWO DAYS APART!
@COMALiteJ I'm still confused as to what specifically you are getting at. You mentioned a shared characteristic between most of the school shooters. Do you mean that they are white and middle class? How could this have affected Moore's investigation? Or are you talking about something else which you have yet to mention?
@likeastarbaby, yes, they were all white and middle class until B4C was released (let alone produced) and for some time thereafter.
Since then, there've been two exceptions that I know of (there may be a few more): Jeff Weise of the Red Lake Indian Reservation (the first non-white and the only lower-class perp and community), and Cho of Virginia Tech (second non-white, still upper middle-class or better both for perp and community).
Even the existence of EXCEPTIONS happening later fits!
I also pointed out the timing. This is a relatively recent (starting in 1996), very SUDDEN and STEEP statistical SPIKE. It was NOT a gradual thing. This is NOT something that had been happening all along!
NOTHING GRADUAL CAN EXPLAIN THIS!! Bullying? Been around for millennia. Violence in the media? Been around since at least Western movies and TV. Gun availability? Had 'em all along. Decline of religion? Too gradual.
No, it had to be some SUDDEN thing that got added to our society!
This something sudden had to, at least for school-aged youth, been something that happened shortly before 1996 (cause precedes effect).
I can think of two relevant occurrences. One of them I consider merely contributive, but the other is almost certainly causative — THE CAUSE!
The former, the contributing factor, is ironically enough, President Clinton's Gun-Free School Act, banning guns in schools nation-wide. It took full effect mere MONTHS BEFORE Moses Lake!
That's a contributing factor because it made schools defenseless, and even people who do this sort of insane thing, even those planning to die in the act, are still sane enough to know that they won't get to kill as many victims and make their perverted final statement if they get killed themselves BEFORE they get to take out victims.
So, they go where the DEFENSELESS PEOPLE are. It really is as simple as that. Schools nationwide were rendered defenseless by that Act.
In fact, many other similar massacres happened in places where it was known that guns were banned. Examples include the Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, TX. A woman there was an expert marksperson and had a clear shot at the perpetrator from behind. She could easily have taken him out — if only she hadn't left her handgun in the car, because that cafeteria had a "No Guns Allowed" sign and she was a law-abiding citizen. She watched helplessly as her parents were killed before her very eyes.
But as I said, this was merely a contributing factor, and explains why so many such incidents were happening in schools. It doesn't explain why they happened at all, in the FIRST place — what MADE the perpetrators "snap." It only explains why they did what they did WHERE they did it, not why they did it at ALL.
For that, we need to look at something else that had happened shortly BEFORE the rash of school shootings. There had been ANOTHER rash of unexplained violence some years earlier.
This earlier rash of violence, like the later school shooting sprees, happened among a group of people who had previously been considered harmless, the last adults one would expect to do such things. They started snapping left and right, in wildly disparate places in the nation, all within a short period of time.
So shocking was this to the national consciousness that a whole new idiom was added to the English language:
"Going Postal."
Yes, I refer to the postal worker rampage of the 1980s.
@COMALiteJ What are you trying to say Moore should have focused on then? If it was a psychological illness that they all shared then yes, that would make sense. But he can't exactly analyse the white, middle class male and say that they are most likely to be shooters. I wouldn't think that was particularly relevant if i'm honest. I would say it was largely coincidental due to the fact that America is in most part a white community, and males are more instinctively aggressive than females?
@likeastarbaby, yes, it's a psychological illness. It's called "hypermania." Its symptoms are basically those of megalomania and monomania combined, amped up on Kryptonian steroids.
The key thing, though, is that something very specific CAUSED these rashes of hypermania — something that would've been right up Moore's alley!
We're talking corporate malfeasance here on a grand scale, a potential litigation nightmare that makes the second-hand smoke class-actions look like chump change.
Hypermania causes its sufferers to have an enormously inflated sense of self-importance, to the extent that any insult or slight against them, however minor, whether real or imagined, is blown all out of proportion. It weakens or shuts down the conscience, negating feelings of any value in the lives of others. Any love one may have had for others is negated or even reversed into murderous hatred. Intelligence is NOT affected — indeed, "overproduction of ideas" is listed as a symptom.
Hypermania is not new. It's been around forever, but was EXTREMELY rare until the 1980s. In the past, the usual causes were a specific kind of blow to the head that damages a specific part of the brain (Andrew Kehoe, perpetrator of the Bath School Massacre, is known for a fact to have suffered a blow to the head that very likely was of the proper type), or a brain tumor (e.g. Charles Whitman, the Texas University Sniper).
But the sudden RASHES of hypermania can't be explained by those.
So what DOES explain these relatively recent hypermania rashes (if indeed hypermania underlies these incidents)? Well, let's look at what we know so far:
1. Until the 1980s, it was VERY rare, and pretty much exclusive to adults. Causes included blows to the head, brain tumors, etc.
2. Suddenly, it started affecting specific groups of people, resulting in them committing massacres. First postal workers (government employees). That subsided. Years later, white upper middle-class youth.
2. (cont) Again, though, this was a steep spike that skyrocketed from almost nothing, peaked shortly after, then declined swiftly (but not as swiftly as it rose) to lower levels (but not as low as they had been before).
Think about THAT for a minute — it’s almost as if, in the cases of both the postal workers and the school shooting sprees, as if someone realized what was causing it and did something to reduce it, WITHOUT revealing it to the public or news media. Now who could do that?
@COMALiteJ Do you mean Hypomania? I wouldn't get too excited about having found that as the cause...its just people concocting theories with no solid evidence to try and explain such tragedys. Harris PERHAPS may have had some characteristics of bipolar, but he had treatment anyway, so theres not much anyone could have done. And anyway, that that type of mania would have been recognised by their parents before their deaths...it just doesn't add up?
@likeastarbaby: "Harris PERHAPS may have had some characteristics of bipolar, but he had treatment anyway…"
DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!! Yes, he had TREATMENT — and that's the POINT!! THAT is the ONE relevant thing that was NEW!!
You see, hypermania (or hypomania if you prefer, but I believe that they're different things) is a KNOWN SIDE-EFFECT (albeit quite rare when properly prescribed, used, and withdrawn from) of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of anti-depressants.
SSRIs of that time were indicated for unipolar depression but NOT for bipolar in youth. But until very recently, bipolar was all but unknown in youth. Psychiatrists rarely diagnosed it, because they generally saw the youth only in the throes of depressive cycles (mania, so long as it doesn't go overboard, is actually useful for a student, and is often mistaken for merely excessive youthful exuberance). Since depression is all they saw, that was the reasonable diagnosis.
There was even a cover story on this in Time Magazine shortly before: "Young and Bipolar in America." It mentioned how surprised many psychiatrists were that bipolar even COULD happen in younger people, as it had previously been considered a disorder of middle age.
Far from being "just people concocting theories with no solid evidence to try and explain such traged[ie]s," there is PLENTY of evidence behind this. It explains the demographics, and it even has a known CAUSATIVE mechanism.
Government workers were among the first to "benefit" from this new class of psychotropic pharmaceuticals — thus the postal worker rampage. The pharmaceutical companies adjusted the recommended dosages, indications, counter-indications, and drug interaction warnings, and soon after the postal worker rampage subsided (indeed, I know of no such cases in over a generation, yet the idiom remains in our language).
Later, the FDA extended it to youth, and lo! School shooting sprees rash begins!
Not only that, but it begins among PRECISELY those demographics of youth whose parents both could afford the psychiatric care for their offspring, and who even considered such a status symbol ("Oh, my Johnny has to go to his psychiatrist. Sorry he's going to miss soccer practice!"), namely, upper middle-class (mostly white) youth! The sole class exception is much later, on an Indian reservation that gets government funded health care including child psychiatric care.
We don't have to speculate about Jeff Weise. He was KNOWN to have been on SSRIs at the time of the incident. So was Harris (Luvox®). One of Klebold’s friends wrote in a diary that he’d asked for advice in getting off of an SSRI (I think it was Prozac®). Kip Kinkle was on Prozac. Andrew Goldman of Jonesboro's doctor said on TV that he'd treated Andrew for depression (but didn't say with what). Cho, of course, was on several psychotropics. There's lots more.
It works out that, just counting the ones we KNOW about, about ¼ of the school shooting spree perpetrators starting with Moses Lake were on SSRIs or related psychotropics. Do you honestly think that that’s even remotely in line with the SSRI usage ratio of the general population of students of that age group?
Guess how many counter-examples we know of, of students who committed such acts and yet were NOT on any psychotropics at or before the time of the incidents? ZERO! NONE! ZIP! NADA! ZILCH!
Not ONE KNOWN COUNTER-EXAMPLE! Of course, medical records are sealed making tracking such things difficult, but still, given the ones we KNOW about, and the TOTAL ABSENCE of ANY known counter-examples, I think we have probable cause here — enough to justify a study that would open the medical records to the study, just to see how high the percentage is (I suspect that it’s well into majority range, but would love to know for sure one way or the other).
It's not just postal workers and school shooting sprees, either. Brynn Hartman, the wife of the late actor-comedian Phil Hartman whom she murdered just before committing suicide, had Zoloft® IN HER BLOODSTREAM at her autopsy. There are many other such incidents as well.
The pharmaceutical companies certainly seem to be aware of all this. Early on in the rash of school shooting sprees, they adjusted the recommended dosage and related info for youth, and again, the rash peaked and declined.
All such drugs now carry a warning that they may cause suicidal thoughts or acts — but what they neglect to say is HOW the patients taking them tend to commit suicide — namely, BY TAKING OTHER PEOPLE WITH THEM!
As I said before, this would be a liability nightmare that'd make the second-hand smoke lawsuits against the tobacco industry look like chump change in comparison.
When a doctor prescribes medication for you, you can read about its side effects and decide for yourself if it's worth it.
As a parent, you could make similar decisions on behalf of your minor children, as they aren't legally capable of making such decisions for themselves.
But what chance did the students (or the parents of the students) of Columbine (or Jonesboro or Red Lake Washington or Virginia Tech, etc.) have to know that merely attending the same school as someone taking Luvox® or Prozac® or Paxil® or whatever could have fatal side effects? They died of side effects of drugs that SOMEONE ELSE took!
As for what all this has to do with Michael Moore, well, he now knows about it and has said that it's the most likely cause and the only proposed cause that makes sense.
@COMALiteJ Ok...yeah but even if he had done so, unless you believe this theory of him influencing Klebold, Klebold himself didn't have any diagnosed depressive/manic ilnesses, or any drugs in his system at the time of post mortem? As far as I'm aware not every single shooter has had hypomanic symptoms...so that wouldn't be a link...also the symptoms of hypomania arent all aggressive (some like attention deficit or being extroverted seem to be the opposite of what harris was)?
@likeastarbaby, the key thing here is the specific form of hypomania that is triggered by SSRIs, either by their use or by IMPROPER WITHDRAWAL (it has to be done very, very gradually, as in shaving off a bit of a pill, then a bit more off the next one, and so on — merely cutting pills in half with a pill cutter won’t do).
The specific pattern does appear to be common to nearly all, if not absolutely all, of the school shooting SPREE perpetrators (again, NOT one-on-one murders).
Do understand that I am NOT advocating the banning of SSRIs. They do a lot of good for a lot of people. It's just that a particular side effect can apparently be very deadly, not just to the patient, but to others.
Again, the first step would be to have a study which makes the full medical records of the perpetrators of all of the school shooting sprees (and the postal workers, etc.) opened to the researchers, who would check for psychotropics in general and SSRIs in particular.
Such a study would show if the correlation is much stronger than it already appears (and it already appears quite strong).
If the study turns out positive, showing a considerable majority of the perpetrators as having been on such drugs at or before the time of the incidents, then I think we have legal precedent here in the concept of "quarantine." Just a American citizens do have a Constitutional Right to Keep and Bear arms, they ALSO have a Constitutional Right of free travel.
(Within limits, of course: a citizen can’t just waltz into someone else's home, a top secret research lab, military base, etc.). They also have Freedom of Assembly (First Amendment).
And yet, in cases of devastating communicable illness outbreaks, the law can indeed temporarily suspend the ability to exercise those Rights (which is not the same thing as REVOKING the Rights, which no law can do), despite no criminal act on their part. If I get Ebola, I'll likely be confined for the duration.
With this precedent, I think it quite reasonable to SUSPEND the Right to Keep and Bear Arms from anyone who has been prescribed SSRIs or other psychotropics that are implicated. Indeed, a psychiatrist could not write out a prescription for them until the patient signs a waiver, and any arms s/he already has are temporarily confiscated and kept in a safe location. His/her name would be put in a database of No Weapons Ownership that all gun dealers would be able to check prior to purchase.
@COMALiteJ I think i'm losing you...the point I made before is that no matter what the consequences are of withdrawal of this drug, not every school shooter was on this pill...so that would be irrelevant...I wish they all had been, because then we would have a magical solution as to why kids commit mass homocide. But we don't.
@likeastarbaby, "not every school shooter was on this pill."
That's just it — we don't know that for sure (and remember, SSRIs are not the ONLY cause of hypermania — just far and away the most common in the past few decades since Prozac was released). The medical records are SEALED. We know of precisely ZERO known counter-examples of people known for a fact to have NOT been on SSRIs, who committed multiple-victim random-target premeditated school shooting sprees, since SSRIs were released.
@likeastarbaby, like Moore before 9/11, you're focusing more on the TOOL used to kill, and not the much more important fact that people are KILLING each other.
When the murder weapon is taken out of the picture, do you know where the USA is among nations in PER-CAPITA HOMICIDES, REGARDLESS of weapon used?
@COMALiteJ The tool was pretty much the entire point. Homocide is homocide. You'll never be able to fully erase it, or understand why people do it. The fact is, with less guns in the world, there would be a significant decrease in violence and murders. And the fact is, America is too lax with gun laws. I live in London, and yet I have never seen a gun, nor have I heard of someones friends brothers cousin even touching one, let alone popping to my corner shop and buying bullets.
@likeastarbaby, if that were true, then whatever country was highest in gun homicides would also be highest in overall homicides regardless of weapon. As you say, homicide is homicide.
The simple fact is that gun laws do not correlate with murder rates, either way. Some nations have stricter gun laws and more violence. Some have stricter gun laws and less violence. Some have laxer gun laws and more violence. Some have laxer gun laws and less violence (Switzerland, for instance).
@COMALiteJ I think the reason I have such a problem with the weapon of choice is that (obviously besides from explosives) it is the easiest way to kill a lot of people with no skills, assistance or intelligence. Knives are very different. Even Harris suggested that the pair started knifing people, but they didn't want to. The bombs didn't go off, and without the guns, they probably would have found it difficult to kill anybody. I'm talking specifically of school shootings, but also street crime.
@likeastarbaby, yes, guns are easy to use and can kill multiple people quickly, but are not the easiest nor kill the most.
ALL FIVE of the Top Five mass murders on U.S. soil in U.S. history involved a GRAND TOTAL of *ZERO* bullets fired at people. This INCLUDES the Bath School Disaster (worst ever school massacre). Most of them didn't even involve WEAPONS, if by that term you mean something EXPRESSLY DESIGNED to harm or kill people.
(cont. Top Five [by body count] Mass Murders on U.S. soil in U.S. history):
#2: Oklahoma City, hundreds dead. "Weapons": fertilizer, panel van.
#3: Nightclub arson, NYC. 81 dead (perpetrator had been jilted by a girl in the club). "Weapon": gasoline.
#4: Bath School Massacre, 45 dead (= Columbine + Virginia Tech). Weapon: dynamite. Kehoe did fire one bullet, but only at his final bomb, to detonate it, killing himself.
#5: Airline bombing, 45 dead (life insurance scam). Weapon: explosives.
@COMALiteJ I earlier said "excluding bombs" because I'm not taking that into account. The reason I'm not is that both Bath and 9/11 are not attacks carried out by minors/young people. Young people don't have the means or expertise to build bombs. The fact that Harris and Klebold's attempt failed despite their intelligence is an example of this. For the purposes of this particular argument, I'm just focusing on the effects of gun culture on young people in relation to school shootings.
@likeastarbaby: "And the fact is, America is too lax with gun laws."
Even if that were true (which I dispute), the simple fact is that there's nothing we can legally do about it without scrapping our entire Constitution and starting all over from scratch with a second Constitutional Convention. The Bill of Rights is UNAMENDABLE (the only part of the Constitution that is), and the Second Amendment really does mean what it plainly says, as the words and grammar meant at the time.
@COMALiteJ Trust me, if you came to any European country you would be stunned by the difference. It obviously different for you if you live in America (I'm just assuming you do) because that is what you were raised into, but I'm just amazed at how laid back people are regarding guns, its a total culture shock for me. I don't know much about the constitution, to be honest. Individual states can change laws, can't they?
@likeastarbaby: "Trust me, if you came to any European country you would be stunned by the difference."
ANY European country? Really? Okay, sticking to recent memory and not ancient history such as the 100 Years' War, I pick Northern Ireland, circa 1980s. Or how about Bosnia in the 1990s (where the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented)?
"I don't know much about the constitution, to be honest. Individual states can change laws, can't they?"
@COMALiteJ Haha, okay, Europe was a bit broad, sorry. I meant more of the ones local to myself, in which the same kind of culture and decencies are observed as I see here. I'm not saying no-one has a gun, because obviously they do, and it would be stupid of myself to make such a broad statement. I simply mean that its so rare and unusual that I have barely, if ever at all, heard of, and never seen a gun in my life, despite the fact that I live in central London.
@COMALiteJ Yeah, I'll admit I know little of American law or history, seeing as I don't live here, but I think I know the basics. Am I right in thinking the part of the constitution we are discussing is 'the right to carry arms'? I don't know if this is true or taken out of context as i'm getting this from B4C but if a state can pass a law stating that all citizens are required to own a gun, surely they can pass one which bans the ownership and use of guns without a (strictly monitored) license?
@COMALiteJ I did use per capita, Its still over 600% more than The average for Europe. Around 830.4 million living in Europe, that works out to roughly about 1.5 gun murders per capita. Compared to about 6.5 for the US. You cant defend this, so dont even try. Even if Moore did put bias into this, it still doesn't change the fact that in some parts of America, the richest country on earth, has the Highest proportion of Gun crime in the Western World
@adam0900909, yes, you did use per capita, and I said so. But Moore did not. The reason he did not was to inflate the differences between the USA and the cherry-picked handful of other nations he compared us to, to make it look like we had some OUTRAGEOUSLY ENORMOUSLY HUGEMONGOUS GINORMOUS gun deaths problem.
And that was just one of THREE DIFFERENT WAYS that he "cooked" the statistics. Did you check the SOURCES of his statistics? I did.
@adam0900909: "... SOME PARTS of America, the richest country on earth, has the Highest proportion of Gun crime in the Western World"
Notably, the parts with the strictest gun control laws, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, etc.
How's that working out?
The modern rash of school shooting sprees BEGAN on February 2nd, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington — mere MONTHS *AFTER* Clinton's Gun-Free School Zones Act took full effect.
The UK "Used" to have a "Free Public Health Service" but the Hidden from public scrutiny Parasites who "REALLY Own/Control" the World have purposely run-down this service so the "Zionist/Jewish Controlled Government will eventually say that they Have to "Privatise" this service and I guarantee you I know Who will Take-Over! If you really want to "Wake-UP" and know how these Hidden Parasites work, then type in: "The Zionist Gang that bankrupted General Motors!" It's Time to "Wake-UP" to the TRUTH
einrib4truth 2 days ago in playlist Bowling for Columbine
@einrib4truth Hahahah hahahah hahahaha
rangergxi 8 hours ago
While I agree with much of this documentary, Moore is presenting a very innacurate picture of the Canadian ghettos. He should've taken a look at Vancouver and the surrounding area.
KeshiaRambles 3 weeks ago
Best quote from this documentary: "if more guns make people safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world.....it isn't...it's the opposite". Common sense makes sense.
asstomouth1000 1 month ago
Im too scared to turn her body!
What a bitch.And helping that little girl?Never tought of that?
BITCH.
bukowski1950 1 month ago
@bukowski1950 She was scared because she thought she could hurt the girl more. Did you never hear that sometimes when somebody is injured moving them can make things worse? Imagine you were in that position, the woman must've been mortified.
mrsiwtv 1 month ago
@mrsiwtv Yea,i heard.Thats when you suspect person hs damaged/broken spine or neck.Not when someone get shot.When someone get shot you FIRST look where the bullet entered,than stop the bleeding.Not "Im too scared,dont know where she's hit,im too scared to touch/roll her".Only stupid bitch can react like this.And even worse is that its grown woman,and teacher also.
bukowski1950 1 month ago
@bukowski1950 Cut the woman some slack, a little girl has just been shot in front of her. Do you think they really get prepared for cases like this at elementary school? And still, what if the bullet had damaged the spine, I mean the girl was tiny. And are you honestly accusing the woman of letting the girl die on purpose?
mrsiwtv 1 month ago
@mrsiwtv No Im not,Im accusing her to be a stupid bitch.Its not on purpose,it just is,stupid,panicing,bitch.
bukowski1950 1 month ago
@mrsiwtv Also,you get prepared for this when you do "first aid" on driving test.Its fucking LOGIC.
bukowski1950 1 month ago
@bukowski1950 Alright, so she could have done more. But really, getting prepared for this and going through the actual thing is a huge difference.
mrsiwtv 1 month ago
in from scotland- its plain and simple, the black communities in america have went thro and are going thro the same as the irish did in scotland and still do to this day. i say to my black friends in the states. KEEP THE FAITH- WE SHALL OVERCOME!
jonnym940 1 month ago
Charlton Heston is such a disrespectful asshole!!! I can't believe someone could have such an extreme lack of morals. Absolutely disgusting and disgraceful human being. I hope he dies in an ironic matter: getting shot...by his own gun
Titanstower 2 months ago
in a way canada is just like the uk
majority white people
low crime
infinitelimitation 3 months ago
@infinitelimitation I don't think thats how it works.
WMUnited 3 months ago
@infinitelimitation majority white people my ass. I live in canada and trust me when i say it is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world
g5400 2 months ago
@infinitelimitation wot r u saying it is blacks who cause the problems!!!! coz i can tell u now that it the whites who do the hurting and the blacks who get the pain and the blame!!
it the fact america isnt civilized
crackerjacklooplylou 1 month ago
Americ ashould copy canada more...
ACDC920605 4 months ago
asshole @ 9:12
pinkorangesoda 1 year ago 5
sponsored by a funeral home. won 13 state track champ and no track dang. Detroit and compton, inglewood, longbeach, new orleans, rock.
Gideon359 1 year ago
canadians know manners and how to beat the living shit out of their fucking kids - and it must be nice to trust ur government - much respect to canada , and they know how to keep their nose out of other countries bullshit - american government just uses citizens like little stupid tax paying sheep , herds of cattle to fund thier wars - and it pisses us off , so kill a politician ! not each other , know your true enemy
butterball1234abcd 1 year ago 4
This is what happens when you remain part of the commonwealth!
EsoterikSurgery 1 year ago
So what these retards are stating is that we should have universal health care for bangers, so when they get shot they get healed up all nice and can go out and do more shit fuckin up the country and be debt free??? You need to work for what you get, no free rides
MANGLERRRR 1 year ago
I live in Nova Scotia Canada and you never hear about deaths caused by guns. You never hear about murder period the odd time.
Num1ChristianFan 1 year ago
@Num1ChristianFan what do u think of mexico and all that killing is going on there
Gideon359 1 year ago
@Gideon359 Well, I think that you have to keep in mind that the mayority of the guns that the narcotraficants use are made in the EEUU.
francis8656 1 year ago
It's a myth that everybody in Canada doesn't lock their doors.
esh325 1 year ago
someone broke into her house and she still doesn't lock the door, is that what being open minded means?
666spacecowboy666 1 year ago
that ugly ass fat bitch with the blue hair is one reason why canada sucks
nolan080390 1 year ago
yeah free health care in canada! also lawsuits arent existant in canada too! BUT.... the income tax is pretty harsh i hear....canada is still pretty boss though...
4zafan 1 year ago
@4zafan It's not free. You pay for it with your taxes.
esh325 1 year ago
America is and Canada are like Englands kids but American is the naughty one who never calls and Canada is the good respectful (loyal) one.
patsyd80 1 year ago
@patsyd80 i'll take that as a compliment, go America!
666spacecowboy666 1 year ago
i feel as if the culture of Canada is similar to Australia
shifty3204 1 year ago
i love canada
nerdyharry 1 year ago
this part of the documentary just made canada really appealing
PrEtTy10ALLY 1 year ago 52
@PrEtTy10ALLY yeah, but I do suggest you view a conseravative side as well. youtube steven crowder canada health care. It's an eye opener as well
jakeo96 2 months ago
I wouldn't care if there were 10 million shootings per year, I'd still rather live in the us
thrasher729 1 year ago
@thrasher729 Ok but why?
tirekerist 1 year ago
lol! This is so true! I'm glad we don't just shoot people. My aunt was sneaking home one night through the window of my Grandad's house to escape a nasty boyfriend. Grandad heard someone come in, and he had a glass paperweight in hand to scare them off. Luckily he didn't have a gun, or my aunt could have been killed by her own father.
TheFireheart 1 year ago 20
@TheFireheart Or maybe if your aunt had a weapon, she could've just defended herself from the nasty fucker instead of running away!!!!!!!! You make no sense. Obviously there are going to be irresponsible people with weapons but the overall benefit to society cannot be replaced.
1337wafflezz 3 weeks ago
the right to bear arms is not equal to the right to bear a machine gun.
TouchofSyu 1 year ago
@TouchofSyu Most American's don't own a machine gun. They are very difficult to get.
esh325 1 year ago
problems of over population can be solved with a m-16
temporary1121 1 year ago
USA it`s going to the black hole... unfothenetley, they dont nows :-(
jakubhanis1 1 year ago
This is the only thin I don't like about Canada.
Nathanamerican27 1 year ago
hey guess what, Vancouver is the BEST CITY IN THE WORLD....Toronto is number 4 and Calgary is 5....and the first american city that you see in the list is Honolulu, which is like 27...
canada995 1 year ago
the only time my parents purposely locked the door, was to prove me a point, which was to not to stay up late....i got used to it so, so i'd unlock the window or something before i leave.......
yep we Canadians are FUKIN CHILLS MAN
canada995 1 year ago
voice/image coordination for the win!
khyran 1 year ago
I love canada. but kill that fat blue haired chick...
Valentizzle 1 year ago
I wanna move.
vintagebohemian 1 year ago
i love Canada and i live in california
yfset8 1 year ago 4
who knos wat CNDN ghetto that was..i think itwas regent park
Schizoidman2 1 year ago
its because we all smoke weed in canada and are so loving
omggunit 1 year ago
@omggunit yeeeee mannnnnnnn
canada995 1 year ago
An open-minded NRA member is like an apple shaped banana- they don't exist
untruemetalhead 1 year ago 5
This has been flagged as spam show
@untruemetalhead: "An open-minded NRA member is like an apple shaped banana- they don't exist"
Would that include NRA Life Member Michael Moore?
(And for the record, there are some bananas that are shaped a lot like some apples. Do a Google Image Search on "wild banana.")
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
NRA= money hungry bastard
Go 2 hell...
its easy to sell the weapon and never get shot @ by the product
MrMiamiswaggz305 1 year ago
@MrMiamiswaggz305, uh, the NRA does not sell weapons. They’re a political advocacy group, not a manufacturing group. Their only source of income is membership fees and donations.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
what the hell is heston's problem! im not saying guns are wrong but come on, how insensitive can you be!?
GirlDabzz 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@GirlDabzz: "what the hell is heston's problem! im not saying guns are wrong but come on, how insensitive can you be!?"
What do you think Heston did that was insensitive? Be specific, please.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
i love canadians i fact i love all countries
chingchong54 1 year ago 4
@chingchong54 were all brothers and sisters
ahindat2 1 year ago
The best thing about Canada is our free health care. The worst is our winters :( I think we are a bit more laid back then the Americans, but there are still murders being commited over here, and a couple of school shootings in the past as well. Good documentary though.
MotleysRose 1 year ago
@MotleysRose uhhh i like winter...
canada995 1 year ago
I'm moving
wolfmother8719 1 year ago
Im going to canada
zartanhatesyou 1 year ago
GUNS are bad! Dildos are great!
FATALMAMUKA 1 year ago
someone should just shoot that n.r.a cunt he wouldnt be so pro gun then
BOYLOBOYLO 1 year ago 5
@BOYLOBOYLO ) On the contrary, he probably would use it as an pro gun argument for self defense.
Joelduffy 1 year ago
Speaking from an outsiders point of view, there really is no way for even he most patriotic American to dispute any of this. The gun murder statistic alone is enough to prove that something has to chance very soon. And for anyone who tries to argue with this, even if you look at that figure PER HEAD, its still over 600% more than the average figure in Europe.
adam0900909 1 year ago 3
@adam0900909 No, its not gun ownership. Its the fearmongering coorporate media who pump fear into people. Moore used the controll subject of Canada who own guns but dont have the media perpetuating fear. They are breaking society apart from within. Divide and conquer.
LandlessPeasantFuck 1 year ago
@adam0900909: "The gun murder statistic alone is enough to prove that something has to chance very soon. And for anyone who tries to argue with this, even if you look at that figure PER HEAD, its still over 600% more than the average figure in Europe."
You just showed one way that Moore "cooked" the statistics — by using raw counts, when anyone who knows even the BASICS of statistics knows to use PER CAPITA ("per head" as you put it) when comparing different-sized populations.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
But that wasn't the ONLY way he "cooked" them. He "cooked" them an ADDITIONAL TWO OTHER WAYS that I know of (and can prove). And, he OUTRIGHT LIED about what the statistics represent!
He said, "How many people are killed EACH YEAR by guns?" That is NOT what those statistics represent. For that, he'd have to've used a WEIGHTED AVERAGE of SEVERAL THEN-RECENT YEARS, and they'd have to be the SAME years for ALL nations. They'd also ALL have to be from MEDICAL sources, counting ALL gun deaths.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Yet, Moore not only did NOT do that (thus invalidating what he said that the statistics are) and only used ONE year of each nation, he used DIFFERENT years for the different nations. He very deliberately used one of the WORST years in then-recent USA history, and compared it to some of the BEST years in then-recent histories of the other nations (Australia's law enforcement website said that the year he used for them was their second-best EVER!!).
But wait, there's MORE! More Moore? Yes, more!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
You see, on his own website, he says where he got the statistics in an attempt to defend them. He doesn't mention the different years thing — I had to find that out by tracking them back to their sources. But what he DID admit (without pointing out the significance, of course) was that the sources for most of the nations OTHER THAN the USA was from their LAW ENFORCEMENT agencies (FBI equivalent). But did he use FBI figures for the USA? NO!! He used the Center for Disease Control (CDC)!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Now WHY is this significant? Because LAW ENFORCEMENT figures only count deaths from gun CRIMES (homicides, etc.)! But CDC (or equivalent health organizations in other nations) aren't concerned with WHY a person was shot to death. They count ALL deaths caused by high-speed chunks of lead, REGARDLESS of the reason!
By using CDC figures for the USA (ALL gun deaths) and comparing them with the LAW ENFORCEMENT agency figures for other nations (ONLY gun CRIME deaths), of COURSE the USA looks worse.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Moore could very easily have used the FBI figures for the USA (they're readily available on the FBI website, and were at the time of B4C as well), but he did not. He could also have used health stats for the other nations, but mostly he did not. He could've used stats for the same years, and made a weighted average, and used per capita figures instead of raw counts, but he did none of those things either.
That's THREE DIFFERENT WAYS that Moore "cooked" the statistics.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Does the USA have a problem with gun deaths? Yes, yes it does. Even if you "uncook" the statistics, the USA still comes out worse than the other nations Moore mentioned, but not by NEARLY as much. And not the worst of ALL nations — not by a LONG shot. We're only #8 overall in PER CAPITA GUN homicides, and #24 in per capita homicides overall REGARDLESS of weapon type (and really, does it matter? If your loved one is murdered, s/he's just as dead regardless of whether it was a gun, knife, etc.).
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
But merely having the USA be only SOMEWHAT worse than a handful of cherry-picked other nations wouldn't've fit Moore's needs. You see, he changed the POINT of the movie in the middle of making it, because of 9/11! We know this from his own website: mere days later, he wrote that he'd been making "a documentary on gun violence in America, but the worst-ever mass murder in U.S. history has just taken place without a single bullet being fired! ... Boxcutters! I can't get over it! ...
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
(continuing the quote from Moore's article on his own website):
"Boxcutters! I can't get over it! A THOUSAND GUN-CONTROL LAWS would not have prevented this tragedy! WHAT AM I DOING!?"
Actually, had Moore researched further, he'd've seen that "a thousand gun-control laws would not have prevented" ANY of the TOP FIVE mass murders (by body count) on U.S. soil in U.S. history — not ONE BULLET was fired at any person in ANY of them! This INCLUDES the worst SCHOOL massacre, BTW! But I digress...
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Anyway, back to my point: 9/11 was a "wake-up call" to Moore. Up until then, he had just been making this movie as an anti-gun, anti-NRA, and anti-Charlton Heston diatribe. But after that, he felt that he had to give it some deeper purpose, and that was when he tacked on all of the "Culture of Fear" stuff. He kept much of the footage, though, such as his shamefully deceptive interview with Heston at the end.
Too bad he didn't do what he SHOULD'VE done. People DIED because he didn't.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Damn man, are you writing a fuckin research paper?
HunterSoffos 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ
"Now WHY is this significant? Because LAW ENFORCEMENT figures only count deaths from gun CRIMES (homicides, etc.)! But CDC (or equivalent health organizations in other nations) aren't concerned with WHY a person was shot to death. They count ALL deaths caused by high-speed chunks of lead, REGARDLESS of the reason!"
Lead flies at high speeds in cases that aren't someone shooting another person? DOES OBAMA KNOW ABOUT THIS?
Hashashin001 1 year ago
@Hashashin001, yes, it does happen. Suicide and accidental self-shootings are two examples just off the top of my head that do not involve one person shooting another.
But my point was that there are other cases where one person DOES shoot another, that still aren't gun CRIMES. Examples include police action, self defense, and other justifiable homicides.
The law enforcement stats Moore referenced for, say, Germany, EXPLICITLY say that they EXCLUDE ALL those things. The CDC stats INCLUDE them.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Do you see how that is NOT an apples-to-apples comparison, if you compare JUST a SUBSET of gun deaths in other nations to ALL of the gun deaths in the USA?
Moore did this DELIBERATELY. He could just as easily have used the health agency numbers for the other nations, OR he could've used the FBI stats for the USA, putting both on equal playing fields. The USA would still have come out worse — but not so OVERWHELMINGLY worse. And without THAT, his movie had no POINT.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ What? That is bullshit. The figures are accurate estimates. There are other criticisms to do with the film, yes, but this was not one of them. We are all aware that the USA is much bigger than the other countries in Europe so the count will obviously be higher - but how can you compare the gun crime in Canada to the US? Its ridiculous! Even if he HAD done this ridiculously, Americans need to realise how fucking stupid they are being making guns so accessible.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, no, it is not B.S. The figures are not "estimates" at all. They're very much real statistics, from real sources. Moore tells where he got them on his own Website. He does not say which years, though, so I tracked them back further to their actual sources. The figures are mostly exact. But they are used HIGHLY misleadingly, and the way he uses them makes the question he asked, that they supposedly answer, a LIE.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, say, for instance, that you own a service station, and I drive into it, and say to you, "Why are you charging $2.399 a gallon? The service station in the town a few miles up the road was charging only 67.9¢ per gallon!"
You say, "What!? I checked them, and I'm competitive with them!"
"No, I said that they WERE charging only 67.9¢ per gallon. In the late 1960s."
My numbers in that example would be accurate, but misleadingly used — not a fair comparison.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ And you said yourself that even if they were used accurately, America would still come out worse. A lot worse. Hes just trying to home in the point. Also I don't have the effort or patience to research the actual figures, but as far as I'm aware the gun-related death values actually were accurate, as there is a list of criticism of BFC and that was not one of the inaccuracys that was highlighted.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "And you said yourself that even if they were used accurately, America would still come out worse. A lot worse."
I did NOT say "A lot worse." I said that we'd come out worse than MOORE'S CHERRY-PICKED LIST OF NATIONS.
I never said that his statistics were INACCURATE. I said that they were USED MISLEADINGLY — a very different thing. It's called "lying with statistics," and why Mark Twain said that there were "liars, d_mn_d liars, and statisticians."
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ You didn't say a lot worse, I did. And those 'cherry picked list of Nations' are all main countries of Western society. Its not like he chose random, unknown places and chucked them in to keep his figures. Lets be honest, the difference in figures between Canada and America alone were immense, not to mention the difference between Europe and America.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ So you're arguing that the figures aren't actually estimates, they're real values? Surely that makes it look even worse for the US? In this documentary, its obvious that Moore slightly overdramatises, exaggerates and misleads audiences, but despite all that, recieved overwhelmingly positive praise for BFC. And this is because he makes a very real and very necessary point. I'm not going to chuck around a few dodgy figures to belittle or ignore his message.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "So you're arguing that the figures aren't actually estimates, they're real values? Surely that makes it look even worse for the US?"
I tell the truth (unlike Moore), even when it may not be the best thing for my PoV. The statistics are real and accurate, from legitimate sources, but they're cherry-picked and "cooked" in three different ways, so that they convey an extremely misleading conclusion in the minds of the viewers.
The USA is not #1 in gun murders. Top Ten, yes.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Sorry, got a bit mixed up there. The values are real, I meant misleading. I just think the pros outweigh the cons too much to be upset about him manipulating data. But I get that some people find doing things like that sneaky and facist.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "I just think the pros outweigh the cons too much to be upset about him manipulating data."
Really? Considering that if he had done what he should've done, and blew the lid off of the REAL cause of the modern rash of school shootings (note that I've not yet told you just what that is — patience, young padawan! I'm going somewhere with this!), the Virginia Tech. rampage would very likely have been thwarted before it began? Cho was a textbook case (as were Dylan and Klebold).
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ What is the real case you're talking about? As far as I know, they haven't found the real, magic answer to why people commit homocide...apart from depressive tendencys and psychological problems? And I think the problem with stopping the person rather than the weapon is that 'textbook cases' may not always be that. You can't force help on someone who refuses it, and in either case someone who expresses schitzophrenia/depression/social anxiety may not be homocidal.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "And this is because he makes a very real and very necessary point. I'm not going to chuck around a few dodgy figures to belittle or ignore his message."
And what is that "real and necessary point" and "message"? That America is super-violent because of a "culture of fear"? Guess what? That was NOT the original point of the movie. He tacked that on after 9/11 demolished his original point by killing thousands of people without a single bullet (and admitted it on his website).
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ No. I didn't really pick up on the 'culture of fear' stuff too much (this is where it started to get partly irrelevant), except I entirely agree that that is why American's have built up a society where keeping a gun is necessary. The point was about gun culture. I wouldn't think too much into the other stuff, because it was just padding and overdramatising, in order to home his opinion's to his target audience. And whether he lied or not, it did work.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
You see, that's the thing: he originally intended this to be just an anti-gun, anti-NRA, anti-Charlton Heston, and somewhat anti-USA screed. He kept those parts even after his wake-up call.
Had he done what he SHOULD'VE done, namely, sat back and re-evaluated what he was doing, and looked for the REAL cause of the school shooting spree (which, BTW, would've been RIGHT UP HIS ALLEY, and which he later AGREED WITH on video!), Cho would likely have been thwarted before his V.T. rampage.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ I see where you're coming from on this. I actually didn't think that most of this movie was even about Columbine, but just gun crime. Would'a, should'a, could'a. Speaking of Cho...what was his weapon of choice again? Hmm.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, my point in bringing up Cho is that the underlying cause of his rampage was the same as that for Dylan and Klebold, for at least one of the two Jonesboro killers, for Kip Kinkle, and also for the perpetrator of the single worst school massacre in U.S. history, whose body count equals that of BOTH Columbine AND Virginia Tech. COMBINED!
I speak of the Bath School Disaster of May, 1927. It doesn't get talked about as much.
Guess how many bullets were fired at people in that?
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ That was the one with the kids, right? I'm still not seeing the connection because their underlying causes...if you could explain? Lol. As far as I remember they never found a solid reason for Kip Kinkle, and Dylan and Klebold have been debated back and forth from depression to bullying. And the Bath perpertrator was an adult, wasn't it? They tend to do more damage, but psychological problems are harder to trace and monitor than in minors who are in a school environment...
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, rather than give you the answer outright, let me show you the things that Moore should've noticed, and likely would've had he not been so busy libeling the NRA and Heston:
As of the time B4C was made, EVERY premeditated school shooting spree since the current rash started on Feb. 2, 1996 (more on that later) was perpetrated by middle-class (or higher) white youth, in middle-class (or higher) communities. Gee, why didn't the author of "Stupid White Men" NOTICE *THIS*!?
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
(cont.)
Think about THAT for a minute: conventional wisdom would expect that if such things were to happen, they'd be more likely to happen in poorer communities, inner city slums, "da 'Hood," and the like, right? But that's not what happened! The 180° DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE happened!
(Note: I'm talking here specifically about school shooting SPREES, with multiple RANDOM targets, not one-on-one murders that just happened to take place at a school [e.g. Kayla Rowland's murder in Flint].)
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
The reason I'm focusing on the killing SPREES is because they're the really strange statistical spike. One-on-one murders have been happening since Cain vs. Abel (for the Bible believers out there), and while such things are certainly evil (especially when kids are involved, either as victims, perpetrators, or both), otherwise normal people going on sudden rampages and RANDOMLY killing MULTIPLE people who did them no wrong is a WHOLE 'NOTHER LEVEL of evil entirely!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Anyway, notice WHERE these incidents occurred: Littleton, NOT Denver. Pearl, MS., NOT Jackson. Small town and suburbs, NOT big inner cities. Mostly upper middle-class.
Whenever one of these things happened, news crews would focus on some Pillar of the Community type who'd be wringing his hands and moaning, "B-b-but, this is such a NICE, PEACEFUL community! These things DON'T HAPPEN here!"
Excuse ME, Mr. Pillar, but such communities were the ONLY places where "these things" DID happen!!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Next up, the timing. Notice I said earlier that the rash began on Feb. 2nd, 1996? That was the Moses Lake, Washington incident. Prior to that, there were less than one such incident per DECADE! There was one with a white girl perpetrator in the mid-1970s, and before that the Texas University Sniper of 1966, and before that? Well, the Bath School Massacre of 1927!
AFTER that? A mere two years later, there were multiple such incidents in one DAY! TWICE! TWO DAYS APART!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ I'm still confused as to what specifically you are getting at. You mentioned a shared characteristic between most of the school shooters. Do you mean that they are white and middle class? How could this have affected Moore's investigation? Or are you talking about something else which you have yet to mention?
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, yes, they were all white and middle class until B4C was released (let alone produced) and for some time thereafter.
Since then, there've been two exceptions that I know of (there may be a few more): Jeff Weise of the Red Lake Indian Reservation (the first non-white and the only lower-class perp and community), and Cho of Virginia Tech (second non-white, still upper middle-class or better both for perp and community).
Even the existence of EXCEPTIONS happening later fits!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
I also pointed out the timing. This is a relatively recent (starting in 1996), very SUDDEN and STEEP statistical SPIKE. It was NOT a gradual thing. This is NOT something that had been happening all along!
NOTHING GRADUAL CAN EXPLAIN THIS!! Bullying? Been around for millennia. Violence in the media? Been around since at least Western movies and TV. Gun availability? Had 'em all along. Decline of religion? Too gradual.
No, it had to be some SUDDEN thing that got added to our society!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
This something sudden had to, at least for school-aged youth, been something that happened shortly before 1996 (cause precedes effect).
I can think of two relevant occurrences. One of them I consider merely contributive, but the other is almost certainly causative — THE CAUSE!
The former, the contributing factor, is ironically enough, President Clinton's Gun-Free School Act, banning guns in schools nation-wide. It took full effect mere MONTHS BEFORE Moses Lake!
DIDN'T *WORK*, DID IT!?
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
That's a contributing factor because it made schools defenseless, and even people who do this sort of insane thing, even those planning to die in the act, are still sane enough to know that they won't get to kill as many victims and make their perverted final statement if they get killed themselves BEFORE they get to take out victims.
So, they go where the DEFENSELESS PEOPLE are. It really is as simple as that. Schools nationwide were rendered defenseless by that Act.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
In fact, many other similar massacres happened in places where it was known that guns were banned. Examples include the Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, TX. A woman there was an expert marksperson and had a clear shot at the perpetrator from behind. She could easily have taken him out — if only she hadn't left her handgun in the car, because that cafeteria had a "No Guns Allowed" sign and she was a law-abiding citizen. She watched helplessly as her parents were killed before her very eyes.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
But as I said, this was merely a contributing factor, and explains why so many such incidents were happening in schools. It doesn't explain why they happened at all, in the FIRST place — what MADE the perpetrators "snap." It only explains why they did what they did WHERE they did it, not why they did it at ALL.
For that, we need to look at something else that had happened shortly BEFORE the rash of school shootings. There had been ANOTHER rash of unexplained violence some years earlier.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
This earlier rash of violence, like the later school shooting sprees, happened among a group of people who had previously been considered harmless, the last adults one would expect to do such things. They started snapping left and right, in wildly disparate places in the nation, all within a short period of time.
So shocking was this to the national consciousness that a whole new idiom was added to the English language:
"Going Postal."
Yes, I refer to the postal worker rampage of the 1980s.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ What are you trying to say Moore should have focused on then? If it was a psychological illness that they all shared then yes, that would make sense. But he can't exactly analyse the white, middle class male and say that they are most likely to be shooters. I wouldn't think that was particularly relevant if i'm honest. I would say it was largely coincidental due to the fact that America is in most part a white community, and males are more instinctively aggressive than females?
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, yes, it's a psychological illness. It's called "hypermania." Its symptoms are basically those of megalomania and monomania combined, amped up on Kryptonian steroids.
The key thing, though, is that something very specific CAUSED these rashes of hypermania — something that would've been right up Moore's alley!
We're talking corporate malfeasance here on a grand scale, a potential litigation nightmare that makes the second-hand smoke class-actions look like chump change.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Hypermania causes its sufferers to have an enormously inflated sense of self-importance, to the extent that any insult or slight against them, however minor, whether real or imagined, is blown all out of proportion. It weakens or shuts down the conscience, negating feelings of any value in the lives of others. Any love one may have had for others is negated or even reversed into murderous hatred. Intelligence is NOT affected — indeed, "overproduction of ideas" is listed as a symptom.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Hypermania is not new. It's been around forever, but was EXTREMELY rare until the 1980s. In the past, the usual causes were a specific kind of blow to the head that damages a specific part of the brain (Andrew Kehoe, perpetrator of the Bath School Massacre, is known for a fact to have suffered a blow to the head that very likely was of the proper type), or a brain tumor (e.g. Charles Whitman, the Texas University Sniper).
But the sudden RASHES of hypermania can't be explained by those.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
So what DOES explain these relatively recent hypermania rashes (if indeed hypermania underlies these incidents)? Well, let's look at what we know so far:
1. Until the 1980s, it was VERY rare, and pretty much exclusive to adults. Causes included blows to the head, brain tumors, etc.
2. Suddenly, it started affecting specific groups of people, resulting in them committing massacres. First postal workers (government employees). That subsided. Years later, white upper middle-class youth.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
2. (cont) Again, though, this was a steep spike that skyrocketed from almost nothing, peaked shortly after, then declined swiftly (but not as swiftly as it rose) to lower levels (but not as low as they had been before).
Think about THAT for a minute — it’s almost as if, in the cases of both the postal workers and the school shooting sprees, as if someone realized what was causing it and did something to reduce it, WITHOUT revealing it to the public or news media. Now who could do that?
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Do you mean Hypomania? I wouldn't get too excited about having found that as the cause...its just people concocting theories with no solid evidence to try and explain such tragedys. Harris PERHAPS may have had some characteristics of bipolar, but he had treatment anyway, so theres not much anyone could have done. And anyway, that that type of mania would have been recognised by their parents before their deaths...it just doesn't add up?
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "Harris PERHAPS may have had some characteristics of bipolar, but he had treatment anyway…"
DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!! Yes, he had TREATMENT — and that's the POINT!! THAT is the ONE relevant thing that was NEW!!
You see, hypermania (or hypomania if you prefer, but I believe that they're different things) is a KNOWN SIDE-EFFECT (albeit quite rare when properly prescribed, used, and withdrawn from) of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of anti-depressants.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
SSRIs of that time were indicated for unipolar depression but NOT for bipolar in youth. But until very recently, bipolar was all but unknown in youth. Psychiatrists rarely diagnosed it, because they generally saw the youth only in the throes of depressive cycles (mania, so long as it doesn't go overboard, is actually useful for a student, and is often mistaken for merely excessive youthful exuberance). Since depression is all they saw, that was the reasonable diagnosis.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
There was even a cover story on this in Time Magazine shortly before: "Young and Bipolar in America." It mentioned how surprised many psychiatrists were that bipolar even COULD happen in younger people, as it had previously been considered a disorder of middle age.
Far from being "just people concocting theories with no solid evidence to try and explain such traged[ie]s," there is PLENTY of evidence behind this. It explains the demographics, and it even has a known CAUSATIVE mechanism.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Government workers were among the first to "benefit" from this new class of psychotropic pharmaceuticals — thus the postal worker rampage. The pharmaceutical companies adjusted the recommended dosages, indications, counter-indications, and drug interaction warnings, and soon after the postal worker rampage subsided (indeed, I know of no such cases in over a generation, yet the idiom remains in our language).
Later, the FDA extended it to youth, and lo! School shooting sprees rash begins!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Not only that, but it begins among PRECISELY those demographics of youth whose parents both could afford the psychiatric care for their offspring, and who even considered such a status symbol ("Oh, my Johnny has to go to his psychiatrist. Sorry he's going to miss soccer practice!"), namely, upper middle-class (mostly white) youth! The sole class exception is much later, on an Indian reservation that gets government funded health care including child psychiatric care.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
We don't have to speculate about Jeff Weise. He was KNOWN to have been on SSRIs at the time of the incident. So was Harris (Luvox®). One of Klebold’s friends wrote in a diary that he’d asked for advice in getting off of an SSRI (I think it was Prozac®). Kip Kinkle was on Prozac. Andrew Goldman of Jonesboro's doctor said on TV that he'd treated Andrew for depression (but didn't say with what). Cho, of course, was on several psychotropics. There's lots more.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
It works out that, just counting the ones we KNOW about, about ¼ of the school shooting spree perpetrators starting with Moses Lake were on SSRIs or related psychotropics. Do you honestly think that that’s even remotely in line with the SSRI usage ratio of the general population of students of that age group?
Guess how many counter-examples we know of, of students who committed such acts and yet were NOT on any psychotropics at or before the time of the incidents? ZERO! NONE! ZIP! NADA! ZILCH!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Not ONE KNOWN COUNTER-EXAMPLE! Of course, medical records are sealed making tracking such things difficult, but still, given the ones we KNOW about, and the TOTAL ABSENCE of ANY known counter-examples, I think we have probable cause here — enough to justify a study that would open the medical records to the study, just to see how high the percentage is (I suspect that it’s well into majority range, but would love to know for sure one way or the other).
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
It's not just postal workers and school shooting sprees, either. Brynn Hartman, the wife of the late actor-comedian Phil Hartman whom she murdered just before committing suicide, had Zoloft® IN HER BLOODSTREAM at her autopsy. There are many other such incidents as well.
The pharmaceutical companies certainly seem to be aware of all this. Early on in the rash of school shooting sprees, they adjusted the recommended dosage and related info for youth, and again, the rash peaked and declined.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
All such drugs now carry a warning that they may cause suicidal thoughts or acts — but what they neglect to say is HOW the patients taking them tend to commit suicide — namely, BY TAKING OTHER PEOPLE WITH THEM!
As I said before, this would be a liability nightmare that'd make the second-hand smoke lawsuits against the tobacco industry look like chump change in comparison.
When a doctor prescribes medication for you, you can read about its side effects and decide for yourself if it's worth it.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
As a parent, you could make similar decisions on behalf of your minor children, as they aren't legally capable of making such decisions for themselves.
But what chance did the students (or the parents of the students) of Columbine (or Jonesboro or Red Lake Washington or Virginia Tech, etc.) have to know that merely attending the same school as someone taking Luvox® or Prozac® or Paxil® or whatever could have fatal side effects? They died of side effects of drugs that SOMEONE ELSE took!
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
As for what all this has to do with Michael Moore, well, he now knows about it and has said that it's the most likely cause and the only proposed cause that makes sense.
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COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Ok...yeah but even if he had done so, unless you believe this theory of him influencing Klebold, Klebold himself didn't have any diagnosed depressive/manic ilnesses, or any drugs in his system at the time of post mortem? As far as I'm aware not every single shooter has had hypomanic symptoms...so that wouldn't be a link...also the symptoms of hypomania arent all aggressive (some like attention deficit or being extroverted seem to be the opposite of what harris was)?
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, the key thing here is the specific form of hypomania that is triggered by SSRIs, either by their use or by IMPROPER WITHDRAWAL (it has to be done very, very gradually, as in shaving off a bit of a pill, then a bit more off the next one, and so on — merely cutting pills in half with a pill cutter won’t do).
The specific pattern does appear to be common to nearly all, if not absolutely all, of the school shooting SPREE perpetrators (again, NOT one-on-one murders).
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Do understand that I am NOT advocating the banning of SSRIs. They do a lot of good for a lot of people. It's just that a particular side effect can apparently be very deadly, not just to the patient, but to others.
Again, the first step would be to have a study which makes the full medical records of the perpetrators of all of the school shooting sprees (and the postal workers, etc.) opened to the researchers, who would check for psychotropics in general and SSRIs in particular.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
Such a study would show if the correlation is much stronger than it already appears (and it already appears quite strong).
If the study turns out positive, showing a considerable majority of the perpetrators as having been on such drugs at or before the time of the incidents, then I think we have legal precedent here in the concept of "quarantine." Just a American citizens do have a Constitutional Right to Keep and Bear arms, they ALSO have a Constitutional Right of free travel.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
(Within limits, of course: a citizen can’t just waltz into someone else's home, a top secret research lab, military base, etc.). They also have Freedom of Assembly (First Amendment).
And yet, in cases of devastating communicable illness outbreaks, the law can indeed temporarily suspend the ability to exercise those Rights (which is not the same thing as REVOKING the Rights, which no law can do), despite no criminal act on their part. If I get Ebola, I'll likely be confined for the duration.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
With this precedent, I think it quite reasonable to SUSPEND the Right to Keep and Bear Arms from anyone who has been prescribed SSRIs or other psychotropics that are implicated. Indeed, a psychiatrist could not write out a prescription for them until the patient signs a waiver, and any arms s/he already has are temporarily confiscated and kept in a safe location. His/her name would be put in a database of No Weapons Ownership that all gun dealers would be able to check prior to purchase.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ I think i'm losing you...the point I made before is that no matter what the consequences are of withdrawal of this drug, not every school shooter was on this pill...so that would be irrelevant...I wish they all had been, because then we would have a magical solution as to why kids commit mass homocide. But we don't.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, "not every school shooter was on this pill."
That's just it — we don't know that for sure (and remember, SSRIs are not the ONLY cause of hypermania — just far and away the most common in the past few decades since Prozac was released). The medical records are SEALED. We know of precisely ZERO known counter-examples of people known for a fact to have NOT been on SSRIs, who committed multiple-victim random-target premeditated school shooting sprees, since SSRIs were released.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, like Moore before 9/11, you're focusing more on the TOOL used to kill, and not the much more important fact that people are KILLING each other.
When the murder weapon is taken out of the picture, do you know where the USA is among nations in PER-CAPITA HOMICIDES, REGARDLESS of weapon used?
We're not #1. Nor #2. Nor #3.
We're not in the Top Five.
We're not in the Top Ten.
We're not even in the Top TWENTY.
We only BARELY make the Top Twenty-FIVE!!
(#24 to be precise)
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ The tool was pretty much the entire point. Homocide is homocide. You'll never be able to fully erase it, or understand why people do it. The fact is, with less guns in the world, there would be a significant decrease in violence and murders. And the fact is, America is too lax with gun laws. I live in London, and yet I have never seen a gun, nor have I heard of someones friends brothers cousin even touching one, let alone popping to my corner shop and buying bullets.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, if that were true, then whatever country was highest in gun homicides would also be highest in overall homicides regardless of weapon. As you say, homicide is homicide.
The simple fact is that gun laws do not correlate with murder rates, either way. Some nations have stricter gun laws and more violence. Some have stricter gun laws and less violence. Some have laxer gun laws and more violence. Some have laxer gun laws and less violence (Switzerland, for instance).
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ I think the reason I have such a problem with the weapon of choice is that (obviously besides from explosives) it is the easiest way to kill a lot of people with no skills, assistance or intelligence. Knives are very different. Even Harris suggested that the pair started knifing people, but they didn't want to. The bombs didn't go off, and without the guns, they probably would have found it difficult to kill anybody. I'm talking specifically of school shootings, but also street crime.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby, yes, guns are easy to use and can kill multiple people quickly, but are not the easiest nor kill the most.
ALL FIVE of the Top Five mass murders on U.S. soil in U.S. history involved a GRAND TOTAL of *ZERO* bullets fired at people. This INCLUDES the Bath School Disaster (worst ever school massacre). Most of them didn't even involve WEAPONS, if by that term you mean something EXPRESSLY DESIGNED to harm or kill people.
#1: 9/11, ~3,000 dead. "Weapons": boxcutters, jetliners.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
(cont. Top Five [by body count] Mass Murders on U.S. soil in U.S. history):
#2: Oklahoma City, hundreds dead. "Weapons": fertilizer, panel van.
#3: Nightclub arson, NYC. 81 dead (perpetrator had been jilted by a girl in the club). "Weapon": gasoline.
#4: Bath School Massacre, 45 dead (= Columbine + Virginia Tech). Weapon: dynamite. Kehoe did fire one bullet, but only at his final bomb, to detonate it, killing himself.
#5: Airline bombing, 45 dead (life insurance scam). Weapon: explosives.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ I earlier said "excluding bombs" because I'm not taking that into account. The reason I'm not is that both Bath and 9/11 are not attacks carried out by minors/young people. Young people don't have the means or expertise to build bombs. The fact that Harris and Klebold's attempt failed despite their intelligence is an example of this. For the purposes of this particular argument, I'm just focusing on the effects of gun culture on young people in relation to school shootings.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "And the fact is, America is too lax with gun laws."
Even if that were true (which I dispute), the simple fact is that there's nothing we can legally do about it without scrapping our entire Constitution and starting all over from scratch with a second Constitutional Convention. The Bill of Rights is UNAMENDABLE (the only part of the Constitution that is), and the Second Amendment really does mean what it plainly says, as the words and grammar meant at the time.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Trust me, if you came to any European country you would be stunned by the difference. It obviously different for you if you live in America (I'm just assuming you do) because that is what you were raised into, but I'm just amazed at how laid back people are regarding guns, its a total culture shock for me. I don't know much about the constitution, to be honest. Individual states can change laws, can't they?
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@likeastarbaby: "Trust me, if you came to any European country you would be stunned by the difference."
ANY European country? Really? Okay, sticking to recent memory and not ancient history such as the 100 Years' War, I pick Northern Ireland, circa 1980s. Or how about Bosnia in the 1990s (where the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented)?
"I don't know much about the constitution, to be honest. Individual states can change laws, can't they?"
They cannot override the Constitution, no.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Haha, okay, Europe was a bit broad, sorry. I meant more of the ones local to myself, in which the same kind of culture and decencies are observed as I see here. I'm not saying no-one has a gun, because obviously they do, and it would be stupid of myself to make such a broad statement. I simply mean that its so rare and unusual that I have barely, if ever at all, heard of, and never seen a gun in my life, despite the fact that I live in central London.
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Yeah, I'll admit I know little of American law or history, seeing as I don't live here, but I think I know the basics. Am I right in thinking the part of the constitution we are discussing is 'the right to carry arms'? I don't know if this is true or taken out of context as i'm getting this from B4C but if a state can pass a law stating that all citizens are required to own a gun, surely they can pass one which bans the ownership and use of guns without a (strictly monitored) license?
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ deliberately not ridiculously*
likeastarbaby 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ I did use per capita, Its still over 600% more than The average for Europe. Around 830.4 million living in Europe, that works out to roughly about 1.5 gun murders per capita. Compared to about 6.5 for the US. You cant defend this, so dont even try. Even if Moore did put bias into this, it still doesn't change the fact that in some parts of America, the richest country on earth, has the Highest proportion of Gun crime in the Western World
adam0900909 1 year ago
@adam0900909, yes, you did use per capita, and I said so. But Moore did not. The reason he did not was to inflate the differences between the USA and the cherry-picked handful of other nations he compared us to, to make it look like we had some OUTRAGEOUSLY ENORMOUSLY HUGEMONGOUS GINORMOUS gun deaths problem.
And that was just one of THREE DIFFERENT WAYS that he "cooked" the statistics. Did you check the SOURCES of his statistics? I did.
Read ALL of my posts in that sequence.
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
@COMALiteJ Can I read war and peace instead? It'll take me less time.
adam0900909 1 year ago
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@adam0900909: "... SOME PARTS of America, the richest country on earth, has the Highest proportion of Gun crime in the Western World"
Notably, the parts with the strictest gun control laws, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, etc.
How's that working out?
The modern rash of school shooting sprees BEGAN on February 2nd, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington — mere MONTHS *AFTER* Clinton's Gun-Free School Zones Act took full effect.
*DIDN'T **WORK**, DID IT*!?!?
COMALiteJ 1 year ago
you know this video is really making me hating canadians right now.
LeninfromUSSR 1 year ago
@LeninfromUSSR lol, i am guessing your Russian, cause your user name says USSR, so the only reason you hate us is cause WE RULE HOCKEY....yaaaa baBY
canada995 1 year ago