School Shooting at FSU

Setting aside that, there is the obvious point that you would need many, many mass shooters to make a definite conclusion by studying that, so you are basically doing nothing and hoping that your thesis pans out. And if it did, what action does that translate to? How do you predict if a person will react to the medication? Do you ban it for people it doesnt turn into shooters?

 

I want the whole story, not the numbers. If people can convert it to numbers and determine something from that, more power to them. But I think it's worth considering that there are a number of people who are *almost* school shooters (there's a Tedx by one of them), and the information could be useful in helping them as well.

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I don't believe that. Regardless, even if you're right, better late than never, if we do nothing, there's no reason to expect a change (and again, I'm not advocating for no change in restrictive measures). A deep dive in even the life of one of the shooters *might* reveal parental lapses and help us to find ways to reinforce parenting. Just look at how much effort has gone into active shooter drills...we can't implement the same type of effort into training parents to be better (oddly we haven't made nearly the effort). As I said, it's not even about preventing school shootings, but about improving mental health as not all people who struggle with something are going to turn into shooters...but if it can reduce the chance of even one more school shooter, then that is a win.

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What dont you believe? Would you want to make a judgement based on 3 out of 10 shooters being on medication? 10 out of 100? How many and what percentage would constitute evidence that can be attributed to something other than coincidence? How is that determined? I guarantee there are more white male mass shooters than people on psych meds. You dont even have to do anything to see that. Should we do something about young white men? This is sort of a dangerous road dont you think? I dont think it leads to anywhere good. But I do understand it, because people dont want to do hard things, like go after guns. Drugs are easier to blame and do panics about.

 

I don't see a study that only has actual shooters as subjects going anywhere. However, as an example, it would not be that hard to have say 200 people with the same diagnosis (OCD, Bi-polar or whatever) & have 100 on a drug & 100 not on a drug & see if there is a diff between mass murder ideation. There would also be no need to violate their privacy.

 

I think that has its own problems too, since ideation isnt some kind of independent variable people arrive at like a bolt of lightning ... its a product of media consumption, peer groups, socialization traits, all sorts of environmental factors ... many long before that person arrives in this study. With that ... how do you know its the drugs and not say, the right wing or 'manosphere' media the person is inhaling? None of these people were raised in the same bubble, or a bubble at all.

 

it wouldn't be perfect, but there are at least 3 ways I can think of to confront the bolded concerns.
1. if the med/non med are randomly assigned
2. if a survey attempts to measure some of those things, they could be included in the analysis
3. you could use a matching design where people are matched according to things measured in #2 & the diff between each pair is the variable.

#1 is typically seen as control enough.

 

I guess what I find strange is when this comes up, your main contribution is wondering about psychiatric meds, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Plus, as pointed out, if you track them you most likely will find a positive correlation. People who take psych meds are more likely to be mass shooters!! But the causation is almost certainly the psychiatric condition causes the violence, not the med to treat it. As mentioned you would need a controlled study - unmedicated psychiatric illness propensity for mass shootings vs medicated psychiatric patients. That is an impossible experiment to construct.

 

Maybe, I just think there would be a lot of outside variables that would provide similar correlations. "Raised in a Christian household" or "white" or "picked on as a kid" ... of course, no matter what you find, you will find that many, many more people on meds and raised Christian arent doing mass shootings.

 

Yeah ideation isn’t actual suicide attempts. Some meds require warning levels for suicidal ideation, such as SSRI’s. But it could be that the med reduces whatever filter surrounding suical ideation, but without the med you actually carry through with it.

For this reason also, and I’ll guess you’ll disagree, I don’t know that studies that show reduced suicidal ideation for people receiving gender affirming care is necessarily firm evidence in support of gender affirming care. FTR I’m not necessarily opposed to gender affirming care.

 

That it's basically doing nothing. I don't wish to argue with you whether or not we'd find anything useful (even finding "nothing useful" would be useful in advancing the idea beyond being able to figure out a cause which might actually help make us re-think gun control). I would just ask would you be against allowing this information to be published, and if so, what would be the reason?

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Come on, man. How do you possibly gather that from everything I wrote. I didn't mention meds or mental illness here. You are the one that dug up my reference to the meds from a couple of years ago. Everything I've referenced in this thread about this situation and what I'd like to see going forward has been about the total picture. I don't care whether you think we'd find anything or not...would you be opposed to allowing for the shooter's history to be an open book to the public?

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I'm not against anyone voluntarily giving information about themselves if asked. We learned a lot about serial killers from just talking to them - see the show Mindhunter (though its highly debatable how useful and scientific criminal profiling actually is). If academics want to talk to spree killers and learn what they can, I say fine, give them money too. The problem is that many of them kill themselves or are shot by police, unlike serial killers, so you are going to be missing something no matter what you do. If families release their records voluntarily, that's fine too. I start to have problems when people are "forced" to participate in studies, whether they are incarcerated or not. I dont think you are going to get good answers or data from people forced to participate anyways - which would seem to include interviewing doctors that prescribed medication in the first place.

 

I just found this - medication effect on bipolar suicide rates. The general info is meds for bipolar help reduce suicide rates, although there are a lot of factors. Lithium definitely helps. SSRIs may actually hurt, because SSRIs can activate mania with someone on bipolar.

The Effect of Pharmacotherapy on Suicide Rates in Bipolar Patients - PMC

 

That's not what I asked, though. Would you be against allowing such a shooter's medical/health history to be fully disclosed to the public?

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Same answer, if its voluntary I dont have a problem. I dont like people being forced to divulge private things simply by being called a criminal, under the same grounds that any civil libertarian should ... but I'm a person who thinks people in prison should be allowed to vote, so take that for what you will. I don't think all of your rights are null and void post-conviction.

 

You have a convenient way of forgetting your prior posting. You were discussing “mental health” earlier in this thread. Then you referenced your two years of posting. So I looked at your two years of posting and within 2 minutes verified your prior history of discussing mental health/mental illness, and also the role of psychiatric meds.

 

If we were discussing instances of killers using suitcase nukes, I highly doubt anyone would be contemplating - how do we reduce mental illness to prevent use of suitcase nukes? Maybe it is prescription meds causing the use of suitcase nukes?

we would be doing everything possible to rid the country of suitcase nukes.

 

Let's be clear. You are the one who forgot what I wrote previously as you thought that I wrote about "mental illness." Beyond that, what is your objective here? I've more than clarified what my position is. I'm not certain I have suitable words that will allow you to better understand my position, so maybe it's best that we just disregard each other on this topic until we have a new perspective for each other (and if we do, hopefully we won't continue to drag up old perspectives).

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