The Psych Drug And Media Violence Crutches

Every time some evil whackjob kills a bunch of people, someone well-intentioned points out that Perpetrator X was on psych drugs, and says "Aha! THAT is the reason this happened!"

Sorry, boys and girls, but it won't fly.

Trying to palm mass shootings off on any medication is beyond the realm of statistical reality, since we're talking about a reaction amongst 0.0000001% of the population.
If psych drugs were causative, one would expect one helluva lot more shootings.

The shootings are, however, wholly explainable with regard to human behavior even without the drugs, so piling the drugs into the pot is rather pointless.

If correlation were causation, the fact that the perpetrators drove cars, wore underwear, or ate hamburgers correlate equally highly with their propensity for mass shootings, and with exactly as much evidence that any of those things played a causative role.

If you want to explain it far more simply, look at the growth of such incidents trying to rack up the new Guinness Record for killing innocent people, and the 24-hour news cycle's instant perpetual glorification and immortality conferred upon the perpetrators.

But blaming psych drugs for mass murder is as sketchy as blaming them for suicides, since we're talking about definitionally crazy people from the outset, who already have a propensity to do crazy things, with or without drugs. In my experience, it's usually the lack of taking their meds that causes the biggest problems, and the biggest reason crazy people stop taking them is because they make them feel normal, which to them feels weird. And/or because when they're normal, they think they're fine, so they unilaterally elect to quit taking them.

Because they're crazy.

Look into how few mass murders there were before we took crazy people out of institutions, and began letting them walk the streets with everyone else, and see if the correlation isn't exactly 1:1, and the increased frequency accounted for entirely by population growth over time.

Then flash back to the fact that this latest case was a guy who beat his infant son to the point of skull fracture, abused his wife, and killed a neighbor's pet.
He was either simply evil, or criminally insane, and should have been under lock and key in perpetuity, and gave us multiple warnings he couldn't work and play in society for years in advance.

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Even more specious is trying to palm this off on gory movies and video games.

Like one jackass par excellence tried yesterday.
My rejoinders to that nonsense:

 Got it.
Censorship will save us.
Well-played. 

Hey, have you ever caught any of those violence-laden tragedies from that little jumped-up Limey actor shit, Will Shakespeare? 

What about those bloody chronicles in the Old and New Testaments?
Should we ban those too, and burn them in heaping bonfires? Or just snip out all the bloody parts? 

And the Hays Code? You mean the one in play when Murder Inc. made The Godfather a real-life morality play, instead of just a movie? 

Why was there so much violence in Deadwood, Abilene, and the pueblo of Los Angeles, before the railroads, when there were no movies or video games handy to blame? Did guns cause that? Lack of diversity perhaps?
Toxic masculinity? 

We had all this and more, and still a dearth of crime overall, back when “violence control” was a rope and scaffold, and same-day service. 

Which movies or videos inspired the Hundred Years’ War? The Crusades? Or the genocides in Rwanda? Or Cambodia? Or Armenia? And which video games caused the serial genocides in North America, for millennia before the arrival of the first modern Europeans? 

Less nostalgic bullshit and simpleminded “solutions”, sil vous plait.
If you want Newspeak, the sort of censorship you advocate is how you get Newspeak. The Ingsoc Ministry of Truth approves heartily.
See your doctor about the irony overdose.

Whereupon, gloriously aflame, and running out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas, Lackwit von Hindenburg took his burning zeppelin in for another strafing run, doubling down on his recockulous premise, engendering a couple of further precision flak bursts from moi:

Hollywood took a vote on the “voluntary” censorship of the Hays Code.
The results were:
Good Idea: 0
Fuck you: Everyone.
Thanks for playing. 

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in 1929. Maybe try some ginko biloba for your memory, or just get a refund on your GED. 

There were multiple bombings prior to that: See if Sacco-Vanzetti, or the L.A. Times Bombing, among a plethora of them, ring a bell.
While you’re up, look up Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot; that was in the 1600s. 

By moving the goalposts to mass shootings, you have by default made the entire argument of jackwagons like DiFi and Chuck U Schumer for banning rapid-firing semi- and full-automatic weapons (except for that pesky Constitution thingie). QED 

The ironclad law of statistical analysis is that Correlation does not equal causation. Sorry if you were sick that day in logic class, but that’s your entire argument: Fallacy is logic, because you say so. 

Murder sprees using firearms have also risen in direct proportion to the prevalence of indoor plumbing, professional baseball teams, frozen yogurt flavors, automobiles, and commercial jet travel. Using your jackassical retarded “logic”, we should also ban all those things, because reasons.
Well-played, Einstein. 

The “violence pumped into people’s minds” you cite has caused less than 0.0000001% of the population to undertake mass shootings. 

Ever. 

It has also caused no such spike in Switzerland, India, Japan, Iceland, Canada, Australia, Costa Rica, or really anywhere else, despite the same movies and video games.
So you’ve come up with a hypothesis that accounts for precisely none of the data, and correlates less to reality than randon guessing, i.e. monkeys throwing darts at a wall. 

The only people with less grasp of science and statistics than you are the Leftards pimping Anthropogenic Glo-bull Warming, and “Dr.” Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vax autism crusade. And at least Jenny still has better legs than you.

So are you that much of an anti-reality fallcious ahistorical illogical unscientific clueless fucktard, barking about his own pet prejudice?
Yes. Yes, you are.

We have a First Amendment so that shitheads like you don’t get to appoint yourself the arbiter of what other people write, speak, express, read, watch, or otherwise consume, because you’ve arrogated to yourself the authority and unearned moral superiority to decide that “Average Joe” has had a bit too much to think.

We have a Second Amendment so you don’t even get to try to enforce such arrogant jackassery without first anteing up your liver and dumb ass.
BFYTW

Take your romanticized nostalgic fawning love affair with fascism, and shove it right up your ass.
If you can get it in past your head.
If it’s too tight, maybe ream it out first, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.

People are criminal, and criminally insane, because they're criminal, and criminally insane.
Trying for facile excuses for that is statistically dubious, logically silly, legally indefensible, and morally questionable. And I heartily recommend avoiding it for those reasons alone.

But if you still can't help pouring gasoline on yourself and setting yourself on fire, don't do it on my porch and expect me to fetch you water and salve afterwards.

A salutary dip in a vat of salt water and rubbing alcohol, and beating you dry afterwards with a dry swim fin, I can arrange.

Warning: I work in exactly the medical field, where we medicate crazy people with psych drugs, and in the motion picture business where we make sometimes-violent products. That doesn't bias my answers, but I offer it in illustration of the point that no one is completely unbiased. What it does do is show you that unlike someone spinning guesses out their ass, whether Joe Schmuck on the Internet, or Anderson Goofus on ABCNNBCBS, that I actually have some wee acquaintance with both of the current witches you'd like to throw into the pond, and the science that undermines your current whims. And I can see the carrot you're trying to tie onto her nose.

It's funny when Monty Python did it because they were creating parody.
When you use the exact same comedy script as an instructional manual, it's neither true nor funny.

Bloody peasants.

 

 

UPDATE:

And herewith, just about the exact same points, from Grouchy Old Cripple, yesterday:

You take a million naked apes and line ‘em up and at least one will be psychologically severely damaged. You put ‘em in close living conditions and sooner or later the wackos will do something obscene or brutal or deadly. 

You get over 300 million and put ‘em in cramped, noisy, frustrating communities and the psychos will vent their resentment, their fear, their disgruntlement by whatever means available to them, sharp instruments, pickup trucks, nitrates, or bang sticks. 

It happens. Find the bad guys and eliminate ‘em. Period. Don’t romanticize their psychopathy over and over and over and over on national television. Let those affected by the carnage mourn, but don’t feed the bloodlust of otherwise uninvolved people thousands of miles away. 

The best way to handle killers, rapists, terrorists, arsonists, abusers, deadbeats, malcontents . . . those who don’t work and play well with others . . . is to apprehend them, alive, and let the survivors or families of the victims deal with ‘em. 

Broadcasting people’s loss, grief, pain, suffering, just whets the appetites of other potential psychological predators.  

And as for banning weapons, tell me more about how well that 18th Amendment worked out.

GMTA.