It took a tragedy on America’s birthday, and the death of seven people, to demonstrate once and for all that gun control doesn’t work. Shooter Bobby Crimo bought the murder weapon himself, legally, in Illinois, a state with some of the strongest gun control laws in the country. Red flag laws didn’t stop him. There’s no reason to think they would work anywhere else.
What’s more, the city of Highland Park passed a total ban on assault rifles in 2013. Around the time, Mayor Nancy Rotering bragged: “Banning assault weapons … is one common-sense action to reduce gun violence and protect our children and our communities from potential mass violence and grief.”
It turned out Republicans against gun control were right all along. On July 4, Highland Park’s residents came to know the terror, carnage, and grief that come with living in a “gun-free zone,” areas better described as killing fields. No one can deny it anymore. Gun control comes with a body count. It makes everyone less safe.
Curbing Second Amendment rights won’t stop these shootings. But I know what will. As I reviewed photographs of the cross-dressing killer, who called himself “Awake the rapper,” and as I read about his life and upbringing, Highland Park took on another meaning.
As I watched those rambling, cryptic, sometimes threatening videos on YouTube, and tried to make it through Crimo’s chaotic music videos, I saw psychosis and desperation, a young man searching for meaning, alone, lost in angry fantasy.
I saw the unmistakable signs of drug abuse. Crimo was a marijuana smoker—that was obvious. You can see how, over the years, heavily smoking weed turned his skin gray and hair dull. While marijuana use can ease anxiety, PTSD, and even perform miracles for epileptics, for others it can cause psychosis.
There was more to Bobby Crimo’s decline than just dope. In addition to self-medicating, it’s a safe bet that he was on prescription drugs. Crimo was a member of an online movement called the “Sad Boys,” men who defy stereotypes and share their mental health struggles online. Most have depression.
Crimo was known to police as they had been called to his family home multiple times after he made threats of suicide and murder. These are clear signs of depression.
27 per cent of teens aged 12 to 19 are on prescription drugs, most commonly something for ADD. Over 20 years old—the age range of many white male shooters—it switches to antidepressants. The numbers increase every year, as does the percentage of young people who say they’re depressed.
I understand why journalists are so keen to defend SSRIs, the most common variety of antidepressants. Half of them have prescriptions themselves. I’m not trying to be mean. Just read their social media feeds to see how heavily medicated America’s elite media class is.
Meanwhile, everyone is being paid to lie to you about the medicines. Elites were rewarded during Covid to praise rushed, experimental jabs. We still don’t know if they work (seems not), or what the long-time side effects are (heart attacks in fit 22-year-olds).
Big Tech, politicians, entertainers, and the press closed ranks starting in 2020 to lie to us for Big Pharma. It was an assault on our right to know what they were putting in our bodies. No one was too obscure to bribe. Tiny TikTok influencers with a couple hundred followers were handed $1,200 to make the jab sound safe and cool.
Everyone has their own favorite example of this cringe pharmaceutical propaganda. Mine is LA singing teacher Lisa Donahey belting out THIS GIRL IS ON PFIZER!, screwing up the tune while showing off her “Fauci ouchie.”
Incentives for celebrities, cable news, and newspapers remain huge. Last week, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that hundreds of people are dying without warning every week in the UK. The experts have no idea why, except it’s definitely not Covid, they insist.
We all hate being deceived, treated like we’re idiots. We’re not fooled by made-up terms like “sudden adult death syndrome.” But there’s no slowdown in the bare-faced lies. America’s corporatized, low-IQ media can’t be trusted to hold power to account at all.
Away from the corrupting influence of corporate money, some stories simply don’t excite mainstream journalists, because many hold extremist politics and hateful social attitudes.
White, working-class Americans don’t qualify for victim status. (Even worse, they’re held responsible for Trump.) So journalists only mention them to call them racist, or laugh at their suffering. Consider the horrible, spiteful coverage of OxyContin.
One writer in 2016 said towns ruined by oxycodone, which were overwhelmingly rural, white and Republican, “deserve to die.” That was in National Review, a supposedly “conservative” magazine. Left-wing reporters had even less sympathy.
To the media, men are oppressors, never victims—even children, even though white male literacy is in the gutter, and even though men are hopelessly behind in college. That’s why journalists continue to ignore a scandal that has touched millions of American lives, and which may have contributed to hundreds of acts of mass violence.
I’m talking about the boys placed on drugs to “calm them down,” because teachers find them tough to manage, or to “level them out,” because they are angry and disaffected without God, a stable home life, discipline at school, challenging lessons, sport, or, in many cases, their fathers.
Bobby Crimo joins a long list of shooters with brains damaged by mind-altering substances. Was he on prescription antidepressants as well? The public must see his medical records. We know enough about previous shooters to demand answers.
The media insists there’s no link between violence and SSRIs. Their “fact checks” are never very convincing. The truth is, it’s hard to find a mass shooter who wasn’t on some form of psychotropic, a class of medication that includes antidepressants, anxiety pills, painkillers, and most illegal drugs.
Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in the Charleston church shooting, was on Suboxone. Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza took the antidepressants Lexapro and Celexa. Aurora killer James Holmes? Clonazepam and Zoloft. Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho was prescribed Prozac. The list goes on forever, but the media says you’re guilty of “baseless” and “unfounded” conspiracy theories if you notice a pattern.
Why are so many young men put on SSRIs, Adderall, and other life-wrecking drugs, at rates unthinkable to previous generations? Sometimes, it’s because they are lifelines, at least when used sparingly. For some, under close supervision, they provide essential support with the traumas of teenage years.
More often, however, boys are placed on addictive, dangerous substances almost vindictively, for being full of energy and disruptive when bored—in other words, for being boys. Teens once let off steam in competitive sport and demanding physical activity. But in today’s feminized educational environment, teachers judge boys against female standards of behavior, and punish them when they don’t behave like girls.
In her book The War Against Boys, scholar Christina Hoff Sommers describes how young men are punished for normal, healthy behavior, and how they fall behind in school as a result. Codes of conduct, behavior standards and even exams have all been rewritten to favor girls by the three-quarters of American teachers who are women.
The average age of these teachers is 41. There are very few male teachers who are heroic masculine role models. Schoolteachers of both sexes lean Democrat. 60 per cent of K-12 educators say “white supremacy” is a major problem; some are thinking of their own students.
Our country is becoming fatherless and faithless, with a teaching workforce offended by masculinity and occasionally outright hostile to the sex and race of its students. Stir in decades of reflexive pill-popping culture, and we arrive at a dangerous moment in history: The tranquilization of the American male.
Parents use a variety of potent drugs to make boys obedient and submissive. Usually they don’t consider the potentially devastating consequences. SSRIs can produce the opposite effects to the ones intended. They can create mood swings, paranoia, rage, and outbursts of violence. They have even been linked to murders.
The same adverse reactions can occur in unsupervised patients who abruptly stop taking their pills. Withdrawal can lead to persistent dark or rage-filled thoughts, and suicidal or homicidal urges. When you consider how many people are on these medications, it’s no wonder the country is falling apart.
Footage of Antifa marching in DC on July 4, and a stampede in Philadelphia after two cops were shot on the same day, reveals an America as volatile, frail, and close to snapping as its elderly President. Joe Biden’s mental deterioration and the social decay on our streets are starting to resemble one another.
We can’t safeguard the President’s mental faculties from decline, but we can and we must protect the mental health of the young men in our charge, and the generations to follow. The side effects of SSRIs and other psychotropics is a deliberately overlooked but crucial factor in America’s mass shootings that we still don’t properly understand.
If we don’t act quickly, these mass shootings will continue. They may become more frequent. But to make any progress, we must first accept the lessons of Highland Park, and put gun control behind us. By studying common characteristics of these tortured, psychotic mass shooters, we can work to prevent future attacks.
According to a 2019 Secret Service report, 91 per cent of school shooters exhibit observable mental health symptoms ahead of time. Two thirds announce their intentions before they act. 80 per cent were bullied; 83 per cent are retaliating over a grievance. None of this has anything to do with guns, but it might help us identify potential killers.
Mass violence occurs with or without guns, as Europe demonstrates. Mass stabbings are no less terrifying than shootings. Trucks driven into crowds of pedestrians are no less deadly. More people were killed with hands, fists and feet than rifles in 2020, per the FBI.
Whatever the facts say, Democrats won’t give up their gun obsession willingly. And there are plenty of weak Republicans who vote for a band-aid approach that won’t stop the hemorrhaging. But gun control is a failed solution. We don’t need any more data, in the form of dead bodies, to underscore the point.
So long as Republicans and Democrats are fixated on gun control, we can’t address the true cause of violence. It’s time to tackle the systemic neglect of the American male; the alienated, unstable boys our godless communities and feminized culture have created, and the dangerous drugs we’ve relied on for decades to cover it up.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene represents Georgia’s fourteenth district.
