Following Texas school shooting and Buffalo tragedy, leaders should ask this question
The executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, Mo Canady, told Fox Business that schools are, "seeing more aggression in terms of fights. Sometimes they're shoving matches and sometimes they're flat-out assaults. It's more misbehavior, thefts and those kinds of things" in schools. It didn't used to happen. It's happening now. Why? It's not guns. It's not a gun lobby.
More American families had guns at home 50 years ago than they do now. According to the Rand Corporation, which studied this, 45% of American homes had a gun in 1980. In 2016, that had dropped to 32%. So the problem is not that we're more armed than we were. The problem is that people have changed. Young men have changed. They are more violent. Why?
That's the bipartisan conversation we need to have now. And that conversation has been drowned out by lunatic attention seekers who are hoping to win the next election, but we don't need them now. Never mind your election. There's something really wrong and we can figure it out if we try.
There are probably a lot of causes. The use of antidepressants in this country is increasing dramatically. Between 1991 and 2018, total SSRI consumption increased in the US by more than 3,000%. 3,000%. Remember, these are supposed to reduce mental illness. Now, that's a real stat. It was published in the medical journal "Science of the Total Environment" and it's not just this country.
In Canada, state-funded antidepressant prescriptions for young people doubled over the last decade. Then during the lockdowns, SSRI prescriptions increased even more. A pharmacy group called "Express Scripts" reported that antidepressant prescriptions went up by more than 20% during COVID. According to latest figures, more than 40 million Americans are now taking psychoactive drugs. That's roughly 1 in 10.
So, again, the point of these drugs is to make you healthier mentally, to reduce suicide and violence, and yet suicide rates and rates of violence are spiking. Now, we don't know that that's causation, but it's worth looking at. Of course, it's immoral to criticize Big Pharma. Could we use an honest conversation about this? Yes, immediately. Clearly, something's going on. Watch.
