Oliver North says Ritalin linked to school shootings

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Elkins45 said:
I will now do the thing I just criticized others for and will make a guess.

Middle class white kids tend to have better access to health care and therefore are more likely to be seen by a doctor who routinely hands out drugs as a substitute for parents spending time with their kids and being involved in their lives.
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That's exactly where I was going. I believe minorities are less likely to have their kids medicated. Middle class whites statistically more likely.

I'd like to see a demand that gov publish some numbers. Specifically in schools where bad things happen, and where they don't happen.
 
Carl N Brown wrote:
It does not take much Googling to find professional articles in legit journals that criticize over-reliance on drugging kids.
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Agreed. But that totally ignores the point.

Oliver North, speaking on behalf of the NRA, linked school shootings to Ritalin. No evidence of a causal link was presented. No evidence that most (or even many) of the school shooters were taking Ritalin was presented.
  • Whether Ritalin is over-prescribed is irrelevant to Lt. Col. North's assertion.
  • Whether Ritalin is being used inappropriately is irrelevant to Lt. Col. North's assertion.
  • Whether good parenting is as effective as Ritalin is irrelevant to Lt. Col. North's assertion.
All three could be true. They would still be meaningless in relation to Lt. Col. North's assertion. Until the NRA can show Ritalin in the body of a significant number of school shooters. Until they can show that Ritalin increases the propensity for people with particular psychological abnormalities who are taking Ritalin to commit mass murder. Then, Lt. Col. North's assertion is baseless and serves to make gun owners look like foolish.
 
Entropy, it's great that you and your wife were involved parents. Good work.

I moved last year, and I ended up in an area where a law school friend lived. Her husband pretended to be an attorney, but by her account, he turned out to be a violent sociopath who did nothing but fornicate, take drugs, spend her inheritance to maintain an office, and steal from clients. He is now a guest of the state and will be for the next 9 years or so. She lives in a trailer on a relative's farm, burdened with the student loan debt he falsely claimed to be paying.

She has 3 boys, ages 12 and down. Wonderful kids. I try to advise her on handling them, and I have ended up in the unwanted position of male role model, for which I am not well trained. I am very conscious of the problems my own parents caused. I don't know if I can help these kids avoid "single mom's son" syndrome, but I sure hope so.
 
This is definitely worth looking into. I'm sorry but there is something wrong when so many kids are on medication, especially for behavioral issues. I know of one in particular on several drugs that just needs a more stable home and a few strategic spankings. IMHO, people have been shirking their parental responsibilities and then doping their children when they don't act right. ALL of this crap is solved at home!!! But you can't fix that with a feel-good law.
 
Elkins45 said:
I will now do the thing I just criticized others for and will make a guess.

Middle class white kids tend to have better access to health care and therefore are more likely to be seen by a doctor who routinely hands out drugs as a substitute for parents spending time with their kids and being involved in their lives.
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I would also add that giving the kids drugs means the kid doesn't learn how to deal with his emotions, solve personal problems, and all the other things kids learn as a part of growing up. Stack what you said about parenting on top of immaturity and some homicidal ideation from drugs and you get seriously unpredictable results.
 
The CT state police report was highly redacted when it was released to the public some two years after Sandy Hook, yet their Colonel spoke at a conference for heads of state police agencies and reported that the vast majority of high school shooters since (and including) Columbine have been on Psychiatric drugs. Also noted was that a great many were dabbling into Satanism (i.e. the Columbine shooters were killing cats on a make shift Satanic alter in one of their back yards).

For fear of stigmatizing people with mental health issues and a desire to be all inclusive of deviant religious beliefs, there has been a lot of cover up surrounding school shootings.

There is a massive teen mental health crisis going on in this country with anxiety disorders being rampant in the school system (this from my daughters high school counselor).
 
Tommygunn wrote:
...BUT, I will point out that many drugs administered to children have never been properly tested on children with immature brains,
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There's 60+ years of clinical experience with Ritalin and it was developed, tested and approved for use in "hyperactive" (as that term was defined in the 1950's) children.

While there are "many" psychoactive drugs developed for use in adults that are being administered to children without the benefit of clinical trials specific to children and adolescents, Ritalin is not one of them.

But all of that is irrelevant to Lt. Col. North's assertion that there is a causal link between Ritalin and school shootings. If the NRA has evidence of that, let them bring it forward. If they don't, then Lt. Col. North should keep his mouth shut on a subject he has no qualifications to express an opinion about in his capacity as a leader of a gun owner advocacy group.
 
The premise is BS and a lame excuse that makes the NRA even more marginalized. For awhile, they went for the autism spectrum - but that was a very brief blip and you didn't catch it unless you were in the business.

Returning the idea of the Leave It to Beaver Family with Ward whipping your butt is another fantasy for our times.

Unless you can come up with a message of why the 2nd Amend. is a positive for society - all the excuses that don't stand up to scientific or factual scrutiny (TV, games, ADHD drugs, socialists in the classroom, it's not an assault boom boom, you can shoot a lever action just as fast, everyone should adopt a majority religion, blah,blah) in fact are destructive to the RKBA position.

It is well known in messaging, that if you present a stupid argument for your position, even later good arguments are ignored. The NRA plays into this trap all the time.

Makes you long for the days when we needed guns because there were 50,000 Red Chinese on the TX border and a D-Day sized invasion of Blue Helmeted UN Troops going to land on the coasts to take our gun. My point - we'd better up our game with science and reason and not fund raising blather.
 
stevehgraham said:
Entropy, it's great that you and your wife were involved parents. Good work.

I moved last year, and I ended up in an area where a law school friend lived. Her husband pretended to be an attorney, but by her account, he turned out to be a violent sociopath who did nothing but fornicate, take drugs, spend her inheritance to maintain an office, and steal from clients. He is now a guest of the state and will be for the next 9 years or so. She lives in a trailer on a relative's farm, burdened with the student loan debt he falsely claimed to be paying.

She has 3 boys, ages 12 and down. Wonderful kids. I try to advise her on handling them, and I have ended up in the unwanted position of male role model, for which I am not well trained. I am very conscious of the problems my own parents caused. I don't know if I can help these kids avoid "single mom's son" syndrome, but I sure hope so.
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Time and a firm but loving hand are the best things a dad (biolgical or not) can offer. My own Dad was (and still is) a great role model in some ways, but in some ways he was a good model of what not to do. Because of him I grew up with an iron will, and a great sense of justice, but it was because he beat Mom and us (my sister and I), I vowed not to be that kind of father, and my sister to not marry that kind of man. I have never hit my wife ,or kids, nor has my brother-in-law.
The advice I give you is what I learned from my Father-in-law. He always made his family feel loved and accepted for who they are, but made sure any punishment was commisurate with the infraction. (My Dad's violence was capricious and arbitrary, if you've seen the movie The Great Santini, you have an idea)
 
hdwhit said:
Graping at speculative, even pseudo-scientific explanations for these events makes the NRA - and via their prominence on the issue, all gun owners - degrades their credibility on the issue.
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I will note I posted a link to a study showing a link between mood altering drugs and violence on the first page. So far as I know it is the only one that has been done, but it did show people on SSRI type drugs are almost twice as likely as the rest of the population of Sweden (where the study occurred) to commit violent crimes.
 
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GEM said:
The premise is BS and a lame excuse that makes the NRA even more marginalized.
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It's not BS and it gets closer to the actual root cause than anyone else is. Everyone else is talking bandaid fixes like background checks or gun control laws. All of which ignores the basic fact that it all begins and ends in the home. These monsters are not born, they are made and it happens at home.
 
There are some very, very strong hints in this article I just ran across that are relevant to this discussion. Of course, the article by itself does not begin to answer North's link between the meds and the shootings, but does provide some clues that suggest focused research and investigation should be done...

https://www.usnews.com/news/healthi...urge-in-calls-to-poison-control-for-adhd-meds

There were 156,365 calls to poison control centers for people under 20 who were improperly exposed to ADHD medication from 2000 through 2014, according to the study published in the journal Pediatrics. The number of calls surged between 2000 and 2011 before declining slightly between 2011 and 2014.

Overall, call volume increased by 60 percent over the period, says the study's senior author, Gary Smith.
https://health.usnews.com/health-ca.../2017-04-07/is-adhd-being-oversold-in-america
"As the diagnoses and treatment with medication of ADHD have increased in the U.S., these exposures have also increased, which means we really do need to pay more attention … and for different age groups, come up with different strategies to prevent them," says Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

As of 2016, an estimated 6.1 million children between the ages of 2 and 17 had at some point been diagnosed with ADHD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and survey data. About 6 in 10 currently with ADHD took medication to treat the neurobehavioral disorder, which can make it extremely difficult for children to focus or sit still.

Between 2003 and 2011, the estimate of children and adolescents diagnosed at some point with ADHD rose from 4.4 million to 6.4 million, though those figures are based on a differently administered survey and represent a smaller age range of 4 to 17.

...

But among teenagers, nearly a quarter of calls were for those intentionally abusing or misusing the pills, the study showed. Almost another quarter – nearly 9,000 calls – were related to those between 13 and 19 years old who may have been attempting suicide, which Smith says is "very concerning."

"They're taking bigger doses, it's resulting in more serious outcomes and it's not infrequent," he says. "Looking into the motivations behind these attempted suicides would be absolutely critical."

While the study only reported three deaths, all were tied to intentional exposure among teens, including one suspected suicide. Smith says it's unclear why so many teenagers abused or misused the medication, or whether the pills they took were prescribed to them or not.
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Where there's smoke...
 
There seems to be a link between 'anti-social' behavior and psychiatric drugs. "Normal" behaving kids are not routinely given drugs for their behavior, just the ones who have a behavior problem. So is the link due to the malady requiring (for lack of a better term) the drugs, or do the drugs cause the malady?

I have no problem with parents taking a stand for decency and disciplining children for anti-social acts. However, discipline is not brutality. A spanking may be required with some, but not brutality, nor arbitrary.

To the original poster: I would prefer Col. North and the NRA to refrain from making 'scientific' or 'medical' pronouncements outside their understanding. Various prescription drugs (Ritalin comes to mind) are blamed for nearly everything. There probably are side effects to that and other drugs, but Ritalin is not responsible for all the ills of the world. The world had plenty when the treatments for most problems was wine and oil (in the wound) and later 'bleeding'.
 
hdwhit said:
There's 60+ years of clinical experience with Ritalin and it was developed, tested and approved for use in "hyperactive" (as that term was defined in the 1950's) children.

While there are "many" psychoactive drugs developed for use in adults that are being administered to children without the benefit of clinical trials specific to children and adolescents, Ritalin is not one of them.

But all of that is irrelevant to Lt. Col. North's assertion that there is a causal link between Ritalin and school shootings. If the NRA has evidence of that, let them bring it forward. If they don't, then Lt. Col. North should keep his mouth shut on a subject he has no qualifications to express an opinion about in his capacity as a leader of a gun owner advocacy group.
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No, let .gov publish some numbers. How many violent assaults with any deadly weapon resulting in death by offenders on mind altering prescription meds in schools since 1970. And how many minus the prescription drugs.

Let's see where the chips fall.
 
Dragon breath said:
Add to it social media and video games and all the rest, and you have a recipe for destruction.
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While the effect of social media on propagating violence is still up for debate, essentially every study undertaken trying to determine correlation between playing video games (violent or otherwise) and violent criminal behavior has determined the same thing: playing video games does not increase violent behavior, and in many cases, reduces it.

This lie, propagated by politicians like Hillary Clinton in the late 90s and early 2000s, is a red herring designed to deflect attention from actual societal conditions that lead to violence. We are only harming ourselves and our cause by repeating it.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/video-game-stress-reduction-need-start-playing-right-now/

http://www.delcotimes.com/article/DC/20141001/NEWS/141009988

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8798927/Violent-video-games-reduce-crime.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...f-political-geek-cred/?utm_term=.6cba3764fd69
 
Last edited:
For purposes of stimulating additional discussion, I include information below. NONE of this says, "psychotropic drugs are the reason for school shootings." But there has been serious concern about a link between psychtropic drugs and violence for decades. And as stated in one of the posts above there is almost certainly some connection, although it has not been clearly proven.

Of course, there have been several "lists" (however anecdotal a person thinks they may be) created over the years naming school shooters and connecting them with medications they were on at the time of their crime. Again. Where there is smoke...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...drugs-and-violence-review-fda-data-finds-link

http://www.cchr.org/sites/default/files/education/violence-and-suicide-booklet.pdf

https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatricdrugs-violence/ <--------including following:

  • Between 2004 and 2012, there have been 14,773 reports to the U.S. FDA’s MedWatch system on psychiatric drugs causing violent side effects including:
Website-Graphs-Violence.jpg

8,219 cases of aggression
3,287 cases of mania
971 cases of homicidal ideation
694 cases of hostility
582 cases of physical assault
444 cases of homicide
233 cases of psychosis
226 cases of violence-related symptoms

Note: The FDA estimates that less than 1% of all serious events are ever reported to it, so the actual number of side effects occurring are most certainly higher.
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http://psychrights.org/education/Gu...tionBetweenPsychotropicDrugsAndMassMurder.pdf <----Call for investigation after Newtown

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015337 <--------------A serious attempt at a study, used as basis for one of the articles above.

https://www.corbettreport.com/medicated-to-death-ssris-and-mass-killings/

In the final equation, the question of the causal linkage between SSRIs and indeed other forms of psychiatric drugs and incidents of violence needs to be taken seriously. There are many factors at play here, from differences in individual reactions to the fact that people who are more likely to commit violent acts in the first place are often the people who are prescribed these drugs.

But the threat of violence has been taken seriously enough that the FDA in the US, the Ministry of Health in Japan and other similar bodies in countries around the world have added a warning in their guidelines for antidepressants. According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, “There are cases where we cannot rule out a causal relationship [of hostility, anxiety, and sudden acts of violence] with the medication.” And in the FDA formulation: “Antidepressant medicines may increase suicidal thoughts or actions in some children, teenagers, and young adults within the first few months of treatment.”
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The NRA should thread lightly on linking video games to violence. Why - they need to pay attention to the literature. There are claims that the presentation of gun imagery itself primes folks to be violent. The content of their gun magazines (print and Internet kind) would be claimed to be aggressive primes.

Now, there is a big debate that this priming literature of video games and gun imagery is not not really predictive of violence.

All this is available if you get out of reading media portrayals of scientific literature filtered through cherry picking of political ideologues of both sides of the issues or their BS opinion pieces.

I've read the professional literature on this and for the most part the NRA and the antigunners are talking out of their butt on the science.
 
IMO, all these school shootings are a culmination of a few things.

Broken homes.
Violent video games.
Sensationalizing violence in movies and TV.
Increase in youth medications.
Idiotic parents that let their mentally disturbed child have access to firearms.
Attempts of the Left to take away religion.
Young folks today have an overwhelming sense of entitlement and will become unstable if not catered to.

I am sure there are more, but you get my drift.
 
I've tried repeatedly but can't post a link on my phone. If anyone can search: Study Prescription drugs violent behaviour, there are a pile of hits. Top on my list of results came one from ncbi.nim.nih.gov
 
hdwhit said:
We're quick to point out when the anti-gun movement starts spouting nonsense. How about when the NRA's incoming president is spewing nonsense?
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Is it really nonsense?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rel...s-merits-federal-investigation-300601826.html

CCHR International's investigation into school violence reveals that at least 36 school shootings and/or school-related acts of violence have been committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 172 wounded and 80 killed (in other school shootings, information about their drug use was never made public — neither confirming or refuting if they were under the influence of prescribed drugs or undergone other behavioral therapy.)[2] At least 27 international drug regulatory agency warnings have been issued on psychiatric drugs being linked to mania, violence, hostility, aggression, psychosis and homicidal ideation (thoughts or fantasies of homicide that can be planned).
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No, I don't think it's nonsense at all, but he doesn't have proveable science to back his claim. It simply hasn't been done. Even the CCHR list above simply points out the 36 shootings above were made by someone on or influenced by the drugs-not that the drugs caused the shootings. Lots and lots of circumstantial or anecdotal evidence, no hard link.

That doesn't mean I don't agree with him...
 
Sistema1927 said:
Yep. I am involved as a volunteer in a program providing weekend food bags to school children who do not have enough at home to eat. You can't study if you are hungry, and Monday mornings are hell if you have been hungry all weekend. Some of those kids would gorge on the free school breakfast, to the point of throwing up.

Guess what? We have absolutely zero cases of "food allergies" that we need to address. It appears that only the wealthy kids are privileged enough to have that 1st world problem.
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Yeah, totally. I mean, when someone with a nut allergy goes into anaphylactic shock or even dies, it's totally psychosomatic....:scrutiny:

entropy said:
I will add my personal experience. Both my sons were diagnosed with either ADD (the older) or ADHD, and the younger one was diagnosed bi-polar. The Psychyatrist that diagnosed my younger son bi-polar prescribed Latuda
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He had no business diagnosing a child with bipolar disorder, let alone trying to treat it pharmaceutically.
 
Retired Lt. Col. Oliver North told "Fox News Sunday" that perpetrators of school violence "have been drugged in many cases" and "many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten." He also blamed a "culture where violence is commonplace," pointing to TV and movies.
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Using the scientific method they used to teach in middle school, before “safe places” existed for college students to play with crayons, it is possible to prove or disprove his assertion(s).

It would be no small task though. There are a hell of a lot more variables involved here.
 
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