It has now emerged that the NIU gunman went on his shooting spree after he stopped taking psychiatric drugs. Surely now everyone will react by assuming that his violent episode was the result of severe mental illness and call for more laws to restrict the rights of psychiatric patients. A few more incidents like this and you won’t be able to buy a gun if you’ve ever recieved any kind of psychiatric treatment at all.
In reality, the gunman’s act was most likely not the result of mental illness, but rather of drug withdrawl. It’s well known that most psychiatric drugs cause dependency, and that discontinuation of the drugs often results in severe agitation. This tragedy would probably never have occurred if the gunman had never taken psychiatric drugs in the first place. If we need to ban anything it’s Zoloft, not guns.
They’ll do that, too! They’ll say that anyone diagnosed with a mental illness has to take medication or else they’ll be committed to an institution. There are already people trying to push that.
This sort of thing has another reaction; people like you who assume it was the drugs fault.
Anti-anxiety and anti-depression pills help society more than they hurt. I’ve seen people’s lives change because of psyche drugs, so I’ll never be for banning them.
The fact is, it’s most probable that his mental illness had something to do with it. What was his illness? Mild depression is a bit different from schizophrenia or sociopathism.
In all seriousness, if you have a severe mental disorder, why the fuck should you be buying a gun? That’s just common sense. Yes, it could easily be taken to far, but to say that EVERYONE with a history of mental illness should be guaranteed the right to buy a weapon easily is insane in it’s own right.
[quote]belligerent wrote:
It has now emerged that the NIU gunman went on his shooting spree after he stopped taking psychiatric drugs. Surely now everyone will react by assuming that his violent episode was the result of severe mental illness and call for more laws to restrict the rights of psychiatric patients. A few more incidents like this and you won’t be able to buy a gun if you’ve ever recieved any kind of psychiatric treatment at all.
In reality, the gunman’s act was most likely not the result of mental illness, but rather of drug withdrawl. It’s well known that most psychiatric drugs cause dependency, and that discontinuation of the drugs often results in severe agitation. This tragedy would probably never have occurred if the gunman had never taken psychiatric drugs in the first place. If we need to ban anything it’s Zoloft, not guns.
[/quote]