re: #329 Ghost of a Dopefish

Evening Lizardim from the warm and slushy wild north country. One of my co-workers has a son in the same class as the kid who was shot in St. Paul by an unhinged gunman. It’s getting to the point where I think everybody in America could play Six Degrees of Gun Violence and find a link between themselves and someone who has been wounded or killed with a gun. Ugh. How go things on the front lines of the war on derp?

It certainly seems like we’re in the midst of a huge upswing in gun violence, huh. The question is why does it seem like that.

The national homicide rate for 2011 was 4.8 per 100,000 citizens — less than half of what it was in the early years of the Great Depression, when it peaked before falling precipitously before World War II. The peak in modern times of 10.2 was in 1980, as recorded by national criminal statistics.

“We’re at as low a place as we’ve been in the past 100 years,” says Randolph Roth, professor of history at Ohio State University and author of this year’s “American Homicide,” a landmark study of the history of killing in the United States. “The rate oscillates between about 5 and 9 [per 100,000], sometimes a little higher or lower, and we’re right at the bottom end of that oscillation.”

Last year’s rate was the lowest of any year since 1963, when the rate was 4.6, according to the Uniform Crime Reports compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Don’t relax quite yet: Americans still kill one another at a much higher rate than do citizens of other wealthy nations.

“By international standards, we never really get to ‘low,’ ” Roth says.

Okay, so that’s a valid point, that we probably should be judging ourselves according to other first world, wealthy, prosperous, educated nations, and we don’t. However shouldn’t we also be questioning why the media is pushing the idea that we’re in the midst of an epidemic now, instead of when we actually were like in the seventies and eighties? Instead we’re at record lows and it’s somehow perfectly reasonable for people to argue according to how things seem vs. how they actually are.

If it’s the mass shooting incidents, especially those involving schools then we should be prepared to ask why there weren’t any when the government was dumping millions of assault and battle rifles on the civilian market and allowing them to be purchased via mail order.

One thing we as a society especially are not talking about is the reportedly disproportionate number of active shooters who were on SSRIs and other antidepressant medications at the time of their killing sprees. These now widely prescribed classes of drugs weren’t invented until the 1970’s and if we’re really interested in doing something about this phenomenon we owe it to ourselves to at least honestly examine their association with it. Certainly there were depressed people, people with attention deficit disorder, etc before the drugs were invented, yet for some reason it’s difficult if neigh impossible to find a single prior record of anybody shooting up a school. I understand however why the media is going to be highly reluctant to do much investigation in the matter:

In the US, drug companies spend $19 billion a year on promotions.[18] Advertising is common in healthcare journals as well as through more mainstream media routes. In some countries, notably the US, they are allowed to advertise directly to the general public.