abstract: It is true that guns have been used in many of the violent incidents reported--but so have knives, blunt instruments, and even teeth. But, strangely, most of the focus by the federal government and its agencies and the mainline news media has been on the alleged need to remove guns from the hands of citizens.

Skip Navigation

by Tom Rose

Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy (Ps. 33:18).

Introduction

Two teenagers used illegally acquired guns in late April, 1999, to massacre fellow students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Immediately, the Clinton Administration, the mainline news media, and the usual assortment of anti-constitutional and anti-gun advocates all jumped on the bandwagon to call for outlawing guns. In response to the rising hysteria to further infringe on citizens' constitutionally protected right to own and bear arms, I wrote an article entitled Hidden Facets of the Littleton Tragedy.¹

Since that time, I have continued to read widely and search for additional information which might help shed light on why our country is experiencing such a sudden increase in violence at tax-supported schools. On December 6, 1999, still another school shooting occurred at Fort Gibson, Okla- homa. Thankfully, no one was killed, but four students were wounded. (Note: I do not yet know whether the information which follows is also applicable to the Fort Gibson incident. Only time and further investigation will tell, but at this point I suspect that the same underlying cause will be found.)

More Hidden Facets

Julian Whitaker, M.D., points out that Eric Harris, one of the shooters in the Columbine High School massacre, "was taking Luvox, which like Prozac and Paxil, belongs to the class of drugs known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs)."² He also states that "in one of every 25 children taking it, Luvox causes mania."³ Dr. Whitaker also reports:

...virtually all of the gun-related massacres that have made headlines over the past decade have had one thing in common: they were perpetrated by people taking Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Paxil, or a related antidepressant drug.⁴

– Shawn Cooper, age 15, Notus, Idaho, was taking an SSRI.

– Chris Fetters, Iowa, who killed a favorite aunt, was on Prozac.

– Kip Kinkel, age 15, Oregon, was taking Prozac. He killed his parents, stayed with them all night, and then killed two students and wounded 22 others at Thurston High School.

My research into SSRI drugs, which also includes Ritalin (see below), reveals that these drugs, when given to younger children, serve to turn them into something like placid zombies (my term) without curing them of anything. In other words, these drugs make unmanageable kids to be more manageable. But, when these children become teenagers, and by then they are quite likely to be hooked on these drugs, they sometimes become aggressive, suicidal, or even tend towards murderous acts. This result of taking SSRIs, then, helps explains the rising incidence of shootings at tax-supported schools, whose administrators and teachers actively promote putting youngsters on these drugs to make the students more docile in the classroom. Christian parents who are still playing with fire by sending their children to tax-supported schools should be made aware of the long-term hazards--not only to the moral hazard of secular humanist education, but also to the actual physical hazard--to which they are exposing their children.

Dr. Whitaker also gives examples of adults who have committed heinous acts while under the influence of mind-changing SSRI drugs:

– November, 1991: Barbara Mortengin, age 66, attacked her 81-year-old mother. She bit her savagely more than 20 times, "leaving chunks of flesh strewn on the floor. Barbara had been taking Prozac for the previous two weeks."⁵

– October, 1991: "Kristine Marie Cushing, age 39, ...shot and killed both her children, Elizabeth, age 8, and Stephanie Marie, age 4, while they lay sleeping in their beds, then shot herself, inflicting a non-fatal wound. ...She had been taking Prozac."⁶

Peter Breggin, M.D., author of a book entitled Your Drug May Be Your Problem and an earlier book entitled Talking Back to Prozac, has this to say about SSRI drugs:

...there is substantial evidence that many classes of psychiatric drugs--including antidepressants, such as SSRIs--can cause or exacerbate depression, suicide, paranoia, and violence.⁷

A lot of what we are seeing is individuals losing their feelings for the people in their lives. They stop caring about their husbands or wives or children. They stop caring about God.⁸

Dr. Whitaker relates the tragic story of Matthew Miller, age 13, who changed schools and was a little melancholy. A psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft and told him to try it for a week.

His parents were happy and trusting, though a little perplexed that it all seemed so easy.... His sister complained that he was being loud and bothering her more than normal. His grandmother noted that Matthew "could hardly sit still through our Sunday brunch." In the early morning hours of his seventh day on Zoloft, Matthew committed suicide. He hanged himself in his closet.⁹

(Note: The large pharmaceutical companies have "detail men" who make the rounds to doctors' offices to push the drugs they manufacture, thus the free samples. Beware! Like most Americans who are constantly programmed to blindly obey what doctors say, Matthew's parents didn't realize how dangerous it is to trust their medical advisor without question. The drug produced a symptom called akathisia, a Greek word which means significant physical and mental agitation. It is this effect of SSRI drugs which can stimulate people to acts of violence or suicide.)

Dr. Joseph Taranto states:

...the SSRIs [including Prozac and Luvox] relieve the patient of feeling. He becomes less empathetic, as in "I don't care as much," which means, "It's easier for me to harm you." If a doctor treats someone who needs a great deal of strength just to think straight and gives him one of these drugs, that could push him over the edge into violent behavior.¹⁰

Dr. Taranto told how Julie Meade called 911 in November, 1996, "begging the cops to come and shoot her. And if they didn't do it quickly, she would do it to herself. There was also the threat that she would shoot them as well."¹¹

Ananna Huffington in her syndicated column of July 9, 1998, wrote:

In addition to the case of Kip Kinkel, who had been a user of Prozac, there are much less publicized instances where teenagers on Prozac or similar antidepressants have exploded into murderous rages: teenagers like Julie Marie Meade, from Maryland, who was shot to death by the police when they found her waving a gun at them, or Ben Garris, a 16-year-old in Baltimore who stabbed his counselor to death, or Kristina Fetters, a 14-year-old from Des Moines, Iowa, who stabbed her favorite great aunt in a rage that landed her a life sentence.¹²

Maureen Siclaff, a reporter for the Vigo Examiner of Terre Haute, Indiana, in response to a teenager gunning down other students at a tax-supported school [Springfield, Oregon], researched a book entitled Prozac and Other Psychiatric Drugs, by Lewis A. Opler, M.D. Here are the horrendous side effects she found listed for Prozac: apathy, hallucinations, hostility, irrational ideas, paranoid reactions, antisocial behavior, hysteria, and suicidal thoughts.¹³

In his Nexus article, Jon Rappoport lists a dozen more episodes of school violence. Since there are too many to recite in full, I will simply list the dates and towns where the violence occurred so readers can appreciate the nationwide problem we are facing:

• May 1, 1992, Olivehurst, CA
• January 18, 1993, Grayhurst, KY
• October 30, 1995, Richmond, VA
• February 2, 1996, Moose Lake, WA
• February 29, 1996, St. Louis, MO–
• July 26, 1996, Los Angeles, CA–
• February 19, 1997, Bethel, AK–
• October 1, 1997, Pearl, MS–
• December 1, 1997, West Paducah, KY
• December 15, 1997, Stamps, AR
• April 24, 1998, Edinboro, PA
• May, 19, 1998, Fayetteville, TN

In writing about the ability of SSRI drugs to turn ordinary people into monsters, Dr. Whitaker, writes:

Look, folks, these are the acts of monsters. The accessibility of guns and violent movies alone does not create monsters out of children. But prescription drugs that markedly alter brain chemistry can--and do! Particularly drugs like Prozac, which are in my opinion the chemical equivalent of a ghoulish Stephen King monster hiding in the closet. A few people have tried to warn the neighborhood, but no one is listening.¹⁴

The Scourge of Ritalin

Today millions of school-age children are under the influence of a drug called Ritalin, which is manufactured by a company in Europe. Ritalin is a behavior-modifying drug that is too-readily prescribed for children who are judged to be too hyperactive and thus difficult to control (poor parental discipline? Or too much sugar in the diet?). Symptoms range from a noticeable phlegmatic dullness to violent rages and physical attack whenever the child is displeased.

The so-called "diseases" that Ritalin is prescribed for are known as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Withdrawal from amphetamine-type drugs, of which Ritalin is one, can cause anxiety, depression, irritability, sleep problems, fatigue, and agitation, which can lead to suicidal tendencies or outright violence. Ritalin has been shown to decrease the amount of blood flow to the brain by as much as 20 to 30 percent, according to the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This is exactly the same effect that cocaine produces, and it can lead to the upsetting of glucose metabolism and to the possibility of permanent brain damage (atrophy).

Teachers and administrators at many tax-supported schools pressure parents to put their children on Ritalin so they won't be "disruptive" at school. Jon Rappoport relates that some parents have reported threats from social agencies: "If you don't allow us to prescribe Ritalin for your ADD child, we may decide that you are an unfit parent. We may decide to take your child away."¹⁵

It takes a very strong-willed and independent parent not to cave in to such threats, especially if the parent is a single mother who must work hard to support herself and her household.

Drug Cover-Up?

Michael Grinfeld discovered that "...nearly a dozen court cases involving Prozac have disappeared from the court record."¹⁶ These are lawsuits against Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly which "have apparently been settled, without trial, in such a quiet and final way, with such strict confidentiality, that it is almost as if they never happened."¹⁷ In commenting on this, Jon Rappoport writes,

This smoothness, this invisibility, keeps the Press away and also, most importantly, does not encourage other people to come out of the woodwork with lawyers and Prozac horror-stories of their own, because they are not reading about $2 million or $10 million or $50 million settlements paid out by Lilly.¹⁸

Drug-Pushing Collusion?

In 1996, John Merrow, host of the PBS television series The Merrow Report, produced a program entitled "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?" Mr. Merrow revealed, "a long-term, unpublicized, financial relationship between the company that makes the most widely known ADD medication [Ritalin] and the nation's largest ADD support group."¹⁹

This group is known as Children and Adults with ADD (CHADD). It has 650 local chapters which sponsor regional conferences and monthly meetings, and are often held at tax-supported schools. CHADD tells families about ADD and ADHD and also renders free medical advice featuring Ritalin. Now comes the clincher. Since 1988, when CHADD and the forerunner of Novartis (Ciba-Geigy) began their financial relationship, the company has given almost one million dollars to CHADD. Merrow also revealed that CHADD received a grant of $750,000 from the U.S. Department of Education in 1996 to produce a video entitled "Facing the Challenge of ADD." The video even mentions the drug Ritalin by name.

This appears to be nothing less than a clandestine cooperative collusion between a large pharmaceutical company, the federal government, and a seeming non-government organization (NGO). Shades of Ephesians 6:12? Let us remember this collusive arrangement when more school shootings lead anti-gun activists and tyrannical-minded civil rulers to call stridently to disarm the American public.

Some Thoughts to Ponder

Let me raise some questions and provide some tentative answers at this point: Is not the FDA aware of the effects of these SSRI drugs? Is not the Clinton Administration similarly aware? Is it that such instances of mayhem are seen as a means of aiding and abetting the liberal agenda of disarming the American public? You can guess what my suspicions are. I will let you ponder this question yourself.

It is true that guns have been used in many of the violent incidents reported--but so have knives, blunt instruments, and even teeth. But, strangely, most of the focus by the federal government and its agencies and the mainline news media has been on the alleged need to remove guns from the hands of citizens. They call for the surrender of guns even though the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and many State Constitutions guarantee Americans the freedom to own and bear arms. (Note: It is crucially important for us to always remember that the right to bear arms is not a privilege granted by a benevolent civil authority; rather it is a right that is necessary to enable citizens to preserve their God-given freedom.)

Question:

Why is it that civil rulers all over the world are so persistently intent on disarming citizens? Don't they trust the very people who elected them to office?

Statement of fact:

Over the last couple of years the people in Britain and Australia have been disarmed, and the results have been disastrous! Armed violence has skyrocketed in both countries. Right now the business that it booming most in Britain is that of building "safe rooms" to which citizens can flee for physical safety. Thieves now brazenly break into the disarmed homes even during daylight hours to ransack them at their pleasure!

Question:

If citizens do not insist on retaining their right to bear arms and are disarmed as a result, who will remain to "stand in the gap" to prevent government tyranny? After all, the Jews who were massacred in Germany and in Poland during the 1930s and 1940s would not have been overwhelmed so easily if citizens in those countries had retained their arms and had stood ready to defend their God-given liberty.

Americans today face the very same threat that disarmed citizens in Europe faced 60 and 70 years ago. It is not being unchristian or ungodly for us today to insist on our own God-given right to be armed and ready to turn back tyrants. We live in a sinful world; thus, the existence of a free nation requires that the people be very jealous in preserving their right to own and bear arms, and to keep them ever-handy to resist, on a moment's notice, civil rulers who turn toward despotism.

Many of our founding fathers were dedicated Christians who recognized the ever-present threat of civil rulers to become tyrannical. Thomas Jefferson (though not a Christian) recognized this problem in 1798:

...it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism – free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: ...In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.²¹

Without preserving their right to be armed and ready, a free people can have no guarantee that their children and grandchildren will not be condemned to live in slavery by some tyrant who arrogates unconstitutional power to himself. Because of this inescapable fact, I pray daily that our Lord will bless the citizen militia movement in our Republic. I pray that millions of freedom-loving people--of all races and ethnic backgrounds--will flock to support and join their local citizen-militia groups. This is constitutional, and it is good!

Conclusion

What, then, should Christians (and other concerned patriots) do to turn back the rising epidemic of school violence and to guarantee that would-be tyrants will not be able to foster such instances of violence and then acerbate them into a nation-wide hysteria aimed at disarming a once-free people? (Please note the reference to "once-free people." Because the freedoms which our forefathers bequeathed to us are being completely lost!) Here are some suggestions:

1. Get your children out of tax-supported schools now! (From kindergarten to graduate school!) If you have not yet seen the grave danger posed by the overwhelmingly humanistic, anti-Christian orientation and curricula in America's tax-supported schools and universities, you must be either asleep at the helm or spiritually blind! Act now, before you condemn your posterity to mental inebriation and spiritual and political slavery!

2. Pray that our Lord will bring a spiritual revival to our country, beginning with you and me. A country can be turned around spiritually and morally only as a result of each of us being spiritually awakened.

3. Pray faithfully that God will raise up an exceedingly strong citizen-militia movement in each of America's 3,000-plus counties, and that they will be able to work closely with local county sheriffs and police departments. We must hope and pray that freedom can be restored in our once-free, Christian Republic before it is too late. One way of doing this is to apply the principle of governmental interposition. (To learn how to do this, see Tom Rose, Reclaiming The American Dream By Reconstructing The American Republic.)

4. Share the information in this essay widely. Order extra copies of this issue of The Christian Statesman and give them to parents whose children are on SSRI drugs and to Christian parents who still have their children exposed to the spiritual and physical dangers of attending tax-supported schools.

5. Pray that the Lord will awaken the American people to any collusion between the large pharmaceutical companies, the federal government agencies (FDA, DEA, etc.), the American Medical Association, and the state licensing agencies for professional practitioners. This collusive foursome, in cooperation with a national news media that is always hungering for drug company advertising, has sold the American public on a false paradigm. This false paradigm "hard sells" the illusion that good health can only be achieved through the administration of patented drugs dispersed by "licensed" medical doctors. The implication is that ordinary people are too ignorant or too brain dead, to make intelligent enquiry regarding safe, non-toxic alternatives to patented drugs which have dangerous side effects. The American public generally has fallen for this widely promoted false paradigm that people should do nothing regarding their health "without first checking with your medical doctor."

6. I also suggest that you share the information in this essay with your pastor and the ruling elders of your church. After all, in England during the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, the American clergy were known as "the Black Brigade" because Christian preachers of that era faithfully taught their congregations the principles of freedom from their pulpits! We sorely need this in America today! Spiritual freedom begets political freedom, which naturally generates the rich blessings of economic freedom.

If Americans--or the people of any other nation--would hope for rich economic blessings in the 21st Century, let them first turn to God and seek His truth and the spiritual freedom He promises. It is from this inner spiritual freedom that all political and economic freedoms gain their sustenance.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance. – Psalm 33:12

Tom Rose is retired professor of economics, Grove City College, Pennsylvania. He is the author of seven books and hundreds of articles dealing with economic and political issues, and a member of the National Reform Association board of directors. He can be contacted at aeprose@infonline.net.

See his biography on the American Enterprise Publications web site.

Endnotes

1. Tom Rose, Hidden Facets of the Littleton Tragedy, The Christian Statesman, vol. 142, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1999), pp. 15-21.

2. Julian Whitaker, M.D., "The Scourge of Prozac," Health and Healing 9 (September 1999), 1

3. Ibid.

4. Julian Whitaker, M.D., "The Reason Behind the Madness," Health and Healing 9 (October 1999).

5. Whitaker, "The Scourge of Prozac," 2.

6. Ibid.

7. Peter Breggin, M.D., Your Drug May Be Your Problem; as cited by Whitaker, "The Scourge of Prozac," 3.

8. Peter Breggin, M.D., Talking Back to Prozac; as cited by Whitaker, Ibid., 3.

9. Whitaker, "The Scourge of Prozac," 3.

10. Jon Rappoport, "School Violence: The Psychiatric Drug Connection," Nexus (August - September 1999), 23.

11. Ibid., 23-24.

12. Ibid., 23.

13. Ibid., 24.

14. Whitaker, "The Scourge of Prozac," 2.

15. Rappoport, "School Violence," 27.

16. Michael Grinfield, "Protecting Prozac," California Lawyer, (December 1998); as cited by Rappoport, "School Violence", 27.

17. Ibid.

18. Rappoport, "School Violence," 27.

19. Ibid., 28.

20. Ibid., 28-29.

21. Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 454-455.

Author's note:

Much of the information for this essay came from these sources:

1. Julian Whitaker, M.D., Health and Healing, published by Phillips International, Inc., 7811 Montrose Rd., Potomac, MD. 20854-3394. Ph. 800-539-8219.

2. Jon Rappoport, "School Violence: The Psychiatric Drug Connection," August-September, 1997, Nexus, The Truth Seeker Foundation, P.O. Box 28550, San Diego, CA, 92198. Ph. 619-676-0433; e-mail:tsfradio@aol.com.

back to top