Okay

The BBC just reported, in an offhand way, that the kid in Omaha who shot up a mall — and then shot himself — was on antidepressants. But the reporter was arch about American gun control: The shooting “followed a predictable pattern: a disturbed individual, with access to a gun.” Well, yes. However. I’m not a big partisan in the gun ownership debate, but anyone looking to argue that the number of guns lying around the United States is the reason for the sickening number of mass shootings since Columbine also has to explain why the shootings were so rare before then. By now both mass gun ownership and mass shootings are so normal in the US it’s hard for some people to remember that for a very long time (decades, if not centuries) we had one phenomenon without the other. And ever since the Michael Moore film, it’s an article of faith that Americans just “live in fear” and suffer more mass murders because of all their stupid guns.

Maybe. But something changed in the ’90s. For a while it was trendy to argue that first-person-shooter videogames, which were new back then, had taught kids to kill. But that went the way of blaming Goth music. What a surprising number of mass shootings have in common is simple but not discussed enough: teenagers on antidepressants.

Antidepressants weren’t used too widely before the ’90s, and as a rule they still haven’t been tested — enough, or sometimes at all — on people under 18. But teenagers’ brain chemistry is apparently not like adult brain chemistry, and some antidepressants can bring some kids to the brink of suicide. You might say, “But these kids didn’t commit suicide.” Oh yes they did: One thing almost all mass killers have in common is suicidal desperation. They just project it outward. They tend to die in the process by shooting themselves, or being shot. It’s such a hard and fast rule I wait for the clue in every new story that the shooting was a form of suicide, and the kid in Omaha was a no exception. He seems to have left a note on a car saying he “wanted to go out in style.”

     posted 6 December 2007 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. The first report I heard said he wasn’t on antidepressants. I dunno.

    I just see these things as people who are suicidal but are inspired in their choice of method by what’s going on around them. So post Kurt Cobain everyone shot themselves in the head. This is post Columbine. And wasn’t it Goethe who inadvertently sparked a bunch of copycat Young Werthers?

    I may be too simplistic. I blame video games and antidepressants too.

    — Bowleserised    Dec 7, 10:22 am    #

  2. I thought it was interesting, too, that the US media a couple of times called the AK-47 a “fully automatic assault rifle.” That would make it illegal. If you listen to the 911 call that is just the sound of the shots firing, it’s obvious that this was a perfectly legal semi-auto AK-47. I can buy a semi-auto at my local Big 5 Sporting Goods. The point is that the name of the gun is scary, but no more scary than any other gun which requires you to pull the trigger one bullet at a time.

    — e    Dec 8, 11:52 am    #

  3. It’s rather telling when a report points out someone who’s just shot a load of people wasn’t on antidepressants, isn’t it? Like ‘we assumed he was, as everyone knows that SSRIs don’t work and actually turn kids into gun-toting suicidal zombies, but in this case there might have, amazingly been other factors’.

    — Karl-Marx-Straße    Dec 10, 10:36 pm    #

  4. In the Colorado church shooting they did it again. The media said that he had an “automatic handgun.” It’s like every one wanted to glaze over the fact that every shot was a trigger pull. Yes, it was semi-auto because the next bullet hit the chamber ready for the next trigger pull…but it’s not like he opened up with an automatic uzi or something. Terrible journalism. (SNARK)

    e

    — e    Dec 14, 03:28 am    #

  5. KMS, I’ve never heard one of those reports.

    — Mike    Dec 24, 11:07 am    #