Trump blames "mentally ill monsters"

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A lot more than that

This means that there were mass shootings in the U.S. before video games or the Internet.

I think the list I was looking at was 10 or more killed.

On the list I saw in the link you provided it had smaller numbers included down to 0 killed.

They used four or more people shot who are not the shooter which is the standard if subjective definition of a mass shooting.

Yes, but only because there are also video games about time travel.

These tragic events have occurred periodically for years and likely will continue to occur for ever, until someone eventually ends entire existence.

I believe that this is because the human race have created the cause, through creating a civilization that is extremely stressful to live in and is plagued with all sorts of problems.

Until modern day governments devise strategies to reduce individuals exposure to stress, and other problems that cause to poor mental wellbeing, the world shall continue to have problems.

I think there are a number of factors that lead to such tragic events from occurring, some of the factors have been going on for years. Such as the mental state of the individuals who commit such terrible terror events.

What causes such mental states, must be caused by all sorts of factors as well.

Factors that may include:

upbringing
social isolation
low social status
low income
hostile living environment
made to feel like a loser
lack of opportunities in life, excluded
drug use (some drugs can induce psychosis, such as crystal meth and crack cocaine)
access to firearms
world view / political / religious viewpoint, in some cases indoctrination
feeling of helplessness, unable to change ones own circumstances
unable to control one's own darker destructive thoughts

In short, modern society creates the grounds for such unhealthy developments to grow
in a world that is designed around a game of win and lose, there will always be losers....

seldom do the losers in life say "its not about winning, its about participating"
Life is not a toddlers egg and spoon race! where everyone gets a medal

the "all us people without zillions, who aren't celebrities, who don't have plastic surgery, who don't have potential partners cuing up to mate with us while enjoying a glamorous life of luxury and hob nobbing are losers" is part of the problem...

Extreme ruthless consumerism is the monster that is the mother of many of our societies monsters....

Last edited by madbutnotmad on 08 Aug 2019, 8:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

Just out of interest
i have completed loads of 1st person shooter games which are extremely violent.
I have never shot a real fire arm in my life.

I used to shoot air rifles that fire little lead pellets when i was a kid, i know where the guns are kept.
I have never had an urge to break into the place where the guns are kept to steal guns to go on a rampage
to kill anyone or anything.

I do enjoy a good game on the xbox one though, including far cry, splinter cell, grand theft auto, hitman, watchdogz, assassins creed, Duez Ex etc.

Mind altering drugs is the great unexamined link in these things.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/07/the-link- ... -we-think/

The link between pot and mass shootings may be closer than we think

You can’t walk through the streets of Manhattan these days without smelling weed.

Even as evidence mounts of the health problems associated with marijuana, New York has insisted on joining other greedy states scrambling to legalize this deceptively dangerous drug.

It makes no sense at a time when American youth is suffering from an unprecedented mental health crisis.

And, in all honesty, we cannot rule out a connection between increasing marijuana use, mental illness and the recent spate of mass shootings by disturbed young males.

We don’t yet know much about the mental state or drug use of the El Paso or Dayton killers. But a former girlfriend of Dayton killer Connor Betts, 24, has indicated he was mentally ill, and two of his friends interviewed by reporters this week mentioned his previous drug use.

Just last year, the Parents Opposed to Pot lobby group tried to sound the alarm on the link between marijuana and mass shootings, compiling a list of mass killers it claims were heavy users of marijuana from a young age, from Aurora, Colo., shooter James Holmes and Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner to Chattanooga, Tenn., shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez.

Until we understand those links, it is nuts to enact lax laws that ­encourage more young people to use a drug proven to trigger mental illness.

President Trump was right to highlight mental illness in his remarks Wednesday on the El Paso and Dayton shootings, not that his unscrupulous critics will listen, so determined are they to brand him a white supremacist.

We know from a 2018 FBI report that 40% of “active shooters” in the US between 2008 and 2013 had been diagnosed with a mental illness before the attack and 70% had “mental health stressors” or “mental health concerning behaviors.”

So for anyone actually interested in preventing future such massacres, the so-called “red flag” legislation Trump is advocating to deny people with mental illness access to firearms is the most logical measure and the one most likely to be embraced by both sides of politics.

But it also should apply to marijuana use, seeing as the two go hand in hand.

You can’t address the youth mental health crisis without considering the effect of rising teen marijuana use.

Among American teenagers, the drug’s “daily use has become as, or more, popular than daily cigarette smoking” according to the National Institute of Health’s 2017 Monitoring the Future study.

We’ve successfully demonized cigarettes while new laws send kids the message that marijuana is harmless.

Yet we’ve known for more than a decade of the link between marijuana and psychosis, depression and schizophrenia.

In 2007 the prestigious medical journal Lancet recanted its previous benign view of marijuana, citing studies showing “an increase in risk of psychosis of about 40 percent.”

A seminal long-term study of 50,465 Swedish army conscripts found those who had tried marijuana by age 18 had 2.4 times the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the following 15 years than those who had never used the drug. Heavy users were 6.7 times more likely to be admitted to a hospital for schizophrenia.

Another study, of 1,037 people in New Zealand, found those who used cannabis at ages 15 and 18 had higher rates of psychotic symptoms at age 26 than non-users.

A 2011 study in the British Medical Journal of 2,000 teenagers found those who smoked marijuana were twice as likely to develop psychosis as those who didn’t.

Another BMJ study estimated that “13 percent of cases of schizophrenia could be averted if all cannabis use were prevented.”

That’s more than 400,000 Americans who could be saved from a fate worse than death.

Young people and those with a genetic predisposition are most at risk, particularly during adolescence, when the brain is exquisitely vulnerable.

The evidence of harm is overwhelming, and it defies logic to think that legalizing marijuana won’t increase the harm.

And yet marijuana activists pretend there is no problem and baby-boomer lawmakers, perhaps recalling their own youthful toking, ­ignore the science.

To make matters worse, the marijuana sold at legal dispensaries today is five times more potent than the pot of the 1970s and ’80s, according to a thoroughly researched new book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson: “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Violence and Mental Health.”

Berenson reports that the first four states to legalize marijuana, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, have seen “sharp increases” in violent crime since 2014.

If we care about mental illness, which has been spiking up at an alarming rate in recent years among young people, especially teenage boys, we should care about the convincing evidence of marijuana-induced psychosis.

We didn’t have to wait for three mass shootings in two weeks to know that young males are in ­crisis.

Youth suicide is at an all-time high and rates of serious mental illness in this country are on the rise, especially among people aged 18 to 25, the cohort most likely to use marijuana.

Young people born in 1999, the birth year of the El Paso shooter, were 50% more likely than those born in 1985 to report feeling “serious psychological distress” in the previous month, according to an alarming study published this year in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

With all we know, it’s time to put the brakes on marijuana legalization before it’s too late.

Seems like something started in the 80's. Can't be anything to do with more powerful weapons so it is something in society. Video games definitely became common in the 80's. When did so many Americans become dependant on drugs? Legal or illegal?

Bullcorn.Alcohol and Meth cause more violent deaths than smoking weed ever did.Potheads just want to binge watch Netflix and eat pizza.

I feel sad every time I hear this almost Pavlovian response. I know people hate hearing this - but you must. This is pure propaganda, it comes from a cynical group of international business interests that want weed legal so they can make killer profits (pun absolutely intended). If you believe it, then I have some healthy cigarettes to sell you. Weed is not a peaceable drug. Heavy and long term usage can turn you absolutely loopy, the causative link may not have been verified to the satisfaction of many, but it is coming.

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/can ... nst-women/

Binge watch Netflix, eat pizza and some of the time... kill your girlfriend.

In the week that Darren Pencille was found guilty of murdering Lee Pomeroy by stabbing him 18 times on a train, a severely mentally ill man was convicted of stabbing his mother to death, in part, he claimed, because he felt she had never forgiven him for stabbing her in the neck and drinking her blood some years earlier. The previous week, a man and two female accomplices were found guilty of beating and torturing a young woman in a failed attempt to induce a miscarriage of the baby she was carrying as a result of intercourse with the male defendant, who had taken issue with the girl’s refusal to have an abortion. The following week, a man with the grimly apt name of Adrian Sword was convicted of slashing his wife across the face with an eight-inch Samurai-style blade. The day after this, a 26-year-old man was found guilty of raping and murdering 13-year-old Lucy McHugh, in whose house he had been lodging, after she told him she was pregnant with his child.

The powerful psychoactive pleasure drug common to all these crimes is, of course, cannabis, in every case copious amounts of it smoked over many years. Either this is a relevant factor or it is not. At the very least, I think, we ought to find out before we yield to the demands of billionaire corporations and their political patsies to legalise this drug.

Back in day when it was soap bar and the like I don't think it caused the loopiness but I think it was a catalyst for any dormant mental issues.

The psychoactive content in today's weed is a different story , I just can't see how prolonged and heavy use doesn't f**k you up in some way.

Having said that all the weed smokers I have known listen to music at home and have the munchies unless another drug is involved.

Alcohol is a much greater factor for violence than cannabis . It's easier though to blame cannabis,mental illness etc than to tackle the problem of firearm possession .

The truth of that is debateable, alcohol is rightly connected with all kinds of social ills, domestic violence, deaths by drink driving and all. Cannabis is linked too, though to a different sort of violence. To quote the article I just linked:

Paranoid, brutal, frenzied, sudden, sustained, psychotic: when you read of one or more of these characteristics, you can almost guarantee the attacker smoked cannabis.

It may be soon that we can say that cannabis is as at least as bad or worse than alcohol in its tendency to produce collateral damage.



I don't think firearm possession is the problem. America has had guns far longer than these seemingly bi-annual mass shootings of randomly chosen victims. Even if you could remove guns somehow, knives or vehicles will be used instead as is the case in Stabistan London. You know what has changed for America in recent decades? Hugely increased usage and availability of cannabis along with other mind altering substances, some of which are even prescribed by doctors for all manner of conditions.

The truth of the matter (as I see it anyways) is that there is a killer instinct in humanity that is there by evolutionary selection.

You can get rid of drugs, guns, video games, and every other perceived societal ill in the world and people will still kill each other.

It can be argued that the killings could be lessened via restrictions on the aforementioned perceived societal ills, but that will have unforeseen consequences. Making drugs illegal, for example, creates a black market that incentivizes the creation of gangs and cartels, and funds them to the tune of billions.

It is unwise to do something if said thing is worse than doing nothing at all. The sad truth is that we cannot control the universe, and people we love and care about are going to get sick, injured, and die no matter what we do.

Just as many articles out there that claim otherwise.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegua ... rs-science