Topic: WorldNetDaily
It has yet to be reliably confirmed what psychiatric drugs, if any, Adam Lanza had been taking prior to undertaking his Sandy Hook school massacre. But that's not keeping WorldNetDaily from blaming them anyway.
Barbara Simpson ranted in her Dec. 30 column:
here’s a clear link between SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – and violence, homicides and suicides. The list of horrific crimes by people taking such drugs is daunting. Millions of prescriptions are written annually, a high proportion for youngsters to “calm them down” in classrooms. You know the names: Prozac, Luvox, Zoloft, Paxil; they alter brain chemistry, sometimes with fatal results.
A Jan. 4 article by Michael Carl, in addition to cherry-picking crime statistics to downplay gun violence, gave space to a firearms trainer with the delightful name of Ignatius Piazzato rail against thedrugs
“Prior to the introduction of psychiatric drugs being given to children and adults, we did not have these homicidal and suicidal mass shootings, even though guns were readily available and unrestricted,” Piazza said.
He contended that a ban on the use of psychiatric drugs would result in a significant drop in mass shootings.
“Over time, as our youth are no longer begin drugged into becoming sociopaths, we will return to the days when these type of horrific, murderous rampages never happened,” Piazza said.
WND managing editor David Kupelian devoted an entire Jan. 7 column to the subject, regurgitating a earlier correlation-equals-causation attack he had done in his book "How Evil Works." Once again, he cited the case of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children, blaming the antidepressant Effexor for it. As we pointed out the last time he did this, Kupelian failed to mention the influence of a fundamentalist Christian preacher to which Yates and her husband were in thrall, who preached austerity (the Yates family lived in a bus the preacher had sold them) and taught that it was better to kill oneself than to mislead a child in the way of Jesus. It's arguable that that the life Yates was living compounded the stress on her mental state, but Kupelian is silent about it.
Kupelian then went on to suggest a conspiracy of silence:
When on earth are we going to find out if the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook school massacre, like so many other mass shooters, had been taking psychiatric drugs?
In the end, it may well turn out that knowing what kinds of guns he used isn’t nearly as important as what kind of drugs he used.
That is, assuming we ever find out.
When is Kupelian going to start caring about reporting facts and not spewing baseless conspiracies?
