I’ve got a different answer. I’m certainly no expert in psychology but I say that the enormously high rate of suicide involves a denial of reality and the psychosis that comes with a denial of reality.
From the first day that children enter the government’s public (i.e., government) school system to which their parents are forced to send them, their minds are molded to believe that they live in a free society. Every day, for 12 long years, that’s what they are taught to believe. By the time they graduate high school, there is no doubt in the minds of 18-year-olds that they live in a genuinely free society.
But reality is that Americans do not live in a free society. They live under a welfare-warfare state and a tightly controlled and regulated society.
Last November, the Wall Street Journalreported that suicides in the United States reached a record high in 2022. Almost 50,000 people in the U.S. committed suicide. The suicide rate was the highest since 1941.
According to the article, healthcare professionals blame Covid, illicit drugs, and an oversupply of firearms.
I’ve got a different answer. I’m certainly no expert in psychology but I say that the enormously high rate of suicide involves a denial of reality and the psychosis that comes with a denial of reality.
From the first day that children enter the government’s public (i.e., government) school system to which their parents are forced to send them, their minds are molded to believe that they live in a free society. Every day, for 12 long years, that’s what they are taught to believe. By the time they graduate high school, there is no doubt in the minds of 18-year-olds that they live in a genuinely free society.
Sigmund Freud
As adults at public events, most all of them eagerly stand to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (“with liberty and justice for all”), which, of course, they know by heart given that they were required to recite it every morning before the start of classes. They love singing to themselves, “I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.”
Moreover, the government molds their minds to conform to whatever the government says about freedom. When the Pentagon invades countries like Vietnam, Syria, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many others in the name of “freedom,” most everyone immediately embraces the freedom concept. That’s why so many people were eager to thank the troops for their “service” in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” When the CIA assassinates someone in the name of protecting our “freedom,” hardly anyone gives it a second thought. When U.S. officials use the freedom concept to justify unleashing death and suffering on foreign citizens with sanctions and embargoes, hardly anyone questions it.
AS I SAID…it’s the common denominator. Mind altering drugs that are being prescribed that were not in use back in the 1970’s and 1960’s or farther back. And no, I’m not a doctor or medical mafia member. I’m someone who uses reason, logic, and common sense to come to the conclusions I come to. It is called critical thinking. And the evidence points to mind altering substances that DOCTORS are giving out to patients as the culprit.
Do we need MORE GUN CONTROL? Or BETTER PRESCRIPTION DRUG CONTROL? Reason, logic and common sense should dictate the correct answer.
A mass shooting is defined as an incident where four or more people are shot. So far this year, the numbers average out to 11 mass shootings per week. 2021 saw a total of 692 mass shootings throughout the year.
Year 2022, just the first six months: – January: 41 mass shootings, 59 dead, 128 wounded February: 43 mass shootings, 40 dead, 174 wounded March: 52 mass shootings, 47 dead, 217 wounded- April: 66 mass shootings, 75 dead, 271 wounded- May: 67 mass shootings, 87 dead, 324 wounded-June: 68 mass shootings, 78 dead, 275 wounded- These numbers accumulate to a total of 386 people dead and 1,389 people wounded.
I’m not sure how The Scotsman reporter Rachael Davies who wrote the article on 05/07/2022 came up with May and June numbers…but hey, that’s main stream media for you!
Now let’s take a look at mass shootings in the USA before 1968 and we will go back as far as 1954. 1968 was the year massive gun control reform was passed with the Gun Control Act. One of the provisions was that no longer could a rehabilitated felon ever have possession of a firearm. Let’s look at mass shootings prior to that day and realize that firearms were taken to school by boys who were going hunting afterwards and could be seen in the back windows of their pickups. That you could easily obtain firearms from a Sears & Roebuck catalog without back ground checks at all and have one sent directly to your home with no FFL dealer involved.
Year, 1968. Country USA. Mass shootings,
ONE: The Robison family murders, also referred to as the Good Hart murders, were the mass murders of Richard Robison, his wife Shirley Robison and their four children; Ritchie, Gary, Randy, and Susan on June 25, 1968
1967 NONE
1966 TWO
On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death the previous night, Charles Whitman, a Marine veteran, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, and then opened fire indiscriminately on people on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 14 people, including an unborn child, and injured 31 other people. The incident ended when two policemen and a civilian reached Whitman and shot him dead. At the time, the attack was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, being surpassed 18 years later by the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre.
It has been suggested that Whitman’s violent impulses, with which he had been struggling for several years, were caused by a tumor found in the white matter above his amygdala upon autopsy.
On November 12, 1966, 18-year-old Robert Smith shot and killed five people, 4 women and a toddler, and injured two others at the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona. All seven victims had been shot and one of the victims who initially survived her wounds was stabbed in the back.
The shooting is considered to be the first copycat mass shooting with Smith indicating that he had wanted to kill more than Charles Whitman, the perpetrator of the University of Texas tower shooting earlier the same year.
1965 ONE
Late on the night of April 24, 1965, Michael Andrew Clark, who lived in Long Beach, California, left home in his parents’ car, without their permission. In the back of the car, he had a Swedish Mauser military bolt action rifle equipped with telescopic sight and a pistol he had removed from his father’s locked gun safe along with a large quantity of ammunition. Early the next Sunday morning, he climbed to the top of a hill overlooking a stretch of Highway 101 near Orcutt. As the sun came up, Clark began shooting at automobiles driving down the 101 highway.
Two were killed and six more were wounded as the shooting continued for hours before Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office deputies rushed the hill and Clark committed suicide as they closed in. A five-year-old-boy wounded in the head died a day later bringing the total to three dead for the rampage.
Reportedly the two men killed at the scene of the shooting were attempting to assist others who were trapped in a vehicle which had been hit by the gunfire.
The 1954 United States Capitol shooting was an attack on March 1, 1954, by four Puerto Rican nationalists who sought to promote the cause of Puerto Rico’s independence from US rule. They fired 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols onto the legislative floor from the Ladies’ Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber within the United States Capitol.
The nationalists, identified as Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began shooting at Representatives in the 83rd Congress, who were debating an immigration bill. Five Representatives were wounded, one seriously, but all recovered. The assailants were arrested, tried and convicted in federal court, and given long sentences, amounting to life imprisonment. In 1978 and 1979, their sentences were commuted by President Jimmy Carter. All four returned to Puerto Rico.
Was there a lack of guns? Obviously not. There were M1 Garands from WWII that the NRA purchased and made available for a low price to members as part of the Civilian Marksmanship program. There were M1 Carbine from WWII and lots of 1911 .45 pistols, lots of WWI Springfield rifles, lots of lever action rifles that could hold 7-10 rounds. There were shotguns from Belgium, there were pistols from Germany and Poland.
Some schools in the south had civilian marksmanship classes to teach children marksmanship and how to properly handle firearms.
Not surprisingly, we find that these researchers often have little to no expertise in criminal justice or the actual history of homicides and gun usage. By labeling crime and gun usage to be a matter of “public health,” they have designated themselves, by virtue of being medical doctors, “experts” in the field. Peter Klein has noted how this attitude plays out:
After insisting for weeks that leaving one’s home or gathering in groups of any size was “irresponsible” and a “slap in the face” to medical professionals, doctors and nurses completely changed their minds. The prohibitionist view toward gatherings was specifically applied to those who protested the stay-at-home orders. “Shame on you!” was the general attitude of many medical professionals who opposed the protests. “How dare you not follow the edicts of science!” But, when protests and riots broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s apparent murder by Minneapolis police officers, many doctors, nurses, pundits, and activists completely changed their tune. These protests, the doctors and nurses assured us, were perfectly fine.
The inconsistency in this position was obvious, of course. There clearly was no scientific difference between a gathering designed for protesting forced business closures and a protest against racism. Many suspected (with good reason) that the only relevant difference between the two was that the antiracism protests happened to line up with the left-wing views of the doctors and nurses in question. Suddenly, the dour moralizing and finger wagging of the nurses was gone, replaced by enthusiasm for public gatherings.
But then the supporters of the new protests figured out a way to slap a patina of science on the obviously political nature and incoherence of the views expressed by groups like “Healthcare Workers for Justice“: let’s call racism a public health crisis.
The phrase immediately became common currency among pundits and mainstream media sources. The idea that racism is not just a bad thing but a “public health crisis” thus put the George Floyd protests on equal footing with stay-at-home orders as a necessary thing designed to combat a grave threat to public health. Countless headlines sprang up declaring “systemic racism is a public health issue” and that just as we need masks to protect ourselves from COVID-19, so we need mass gatherings and protests to protect us from racism.
There’s nothing new about this strategy, though. Declaring a wide variety of social ills to be a “public health crisis” is a timeworn tactic used to raise the profile of a specific policy issue. Thus, poverty, pornography, inequality, inadequate housing, road traffic deaths, and capitalism have all been declared to be public health crises.
“Public health crisis” is essentially a left-wing stock phrase at this point, as is reflected by the fact that the solutions proffered to the social ills in question are virtually always some sort of government regulation or income redistribution scheme forced upon the nation’s population.
“Gun Violence” Is a “Social Disease”
Perhaps the most robust example of this can be found in the literature of how “gun violence” is a public health crisis. It is now common to find research on homicides and suicides with firearms in academic journals devoted to epidemiology and public health.
On an article in the International Journal of Epidemiology titled “The Role of Epidemiology in Firearm Violence Prevention,” the authors conclude, “Firearm violence has reached pandemic levels” and is a “social disease.” The prescribed solution can be easily predicted by anyone familiar with these types of articles. The authors’ demand:
[P]ublic health can create, scale up and evaluate interventions designed to address social and behavioural factors associated with firearm violence. We call on governments, community leaders and community members to take meaningful action to support public health in addressing the problem of firearm violence.
These interventions, of course, are all assumed to be more government prohibitions and regulations punishable by fines and jail time.
Not surprisingly, we find that these researchers often have little to no expertise in criminal justice or the actual history of homicides and gun usage. By labeling crime and gun usage to be a matter of “public health,” they have designated themselves, by virtue of being medical doctors, “experts” in the field. Peter Klein has noted how this attitude plays out:
A few years ago an economist colleague of mine debated a professor from our university’s school of public health on gun violence and gun control. My colleague walked through the empirical evidence on the effects of gun control laws on crime, accidental injury, and other social ills, citing well-known studies by economists and legal scholars…The public health professor — an MD who also teaches in the medical school — ignored these issues entirely, instead telling emotional stories about ER patients he’d treated for gunshot wounds and how everything must be done to stop this “epidemic” of gun violence.
It is only natural, of course, for scholars of public health to automatically assume that coercive state measures are the solution to nearly every problem. This is how public health officials and scholars think. Moreover, over the past century the field of public health has expanded to cover nearly every field of public policy as a public health concern. Whether we’re talking about urban planning, crime, highway design, or climate change, bureaucrats and academics—there’s really no difference between the two—in the field of public health have an easy “solution” for you. Chances are it involves a new set of laws and government regulations.
Once upon a time, public health was much more limited in its scope. “Public health” once implied that infectious diseases were involved in some way. This was notable, for example, in public health crusades against tuberculosis, which often spread quickly in the dirty and overcrowded urban tenements of the early twentieth century. In many cases, because of the weakness of state institutions, public health officials relied on education and voluntary adoption of better health practices.
This is rarely the practice anymore. In an age of supercharged state institutions, public health is far more characterized by laws, regulations, coercion, punishment, and mandatory “compliance.” The very use of the phrase “public health crisis” is designed to justify these measures. After all, if something is a threat to public health, we must surely all agree it is of the utmost importance. The Left has mastered the use of this phrase as a political ploy. “Public health,” after all is just a matter of scientific objectivity, and those who disagree are “anti-science.”
It’s a very effective ruse. It remains to be seen how long people will fall for it.
MCViewPoint 