MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME

Imported Article

VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE

Death toll limited before campus gun ban 5 years ago, shooter subdued by armed students

April 22, 2007

World Net Daily Article

A deeply troubled and disgruntled foreign student runs afoul of college authorities.

He comes to the Virginia campus armed and starts shooting in one building.

But, unlike the massacre at Virginia Tech last week, the damage was contained in this incident that occurred five years ago, before the state legislature banned guns on college campuses.

On Jan. 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old student from Nigeria, walked into the Appalachian School of Law offices of Dean Anthony Sutin, 42, a former acting assistant U.S. attorney, and professor Thomas Blackwell, 41, and opened fire with a .380 ACP semi-automatic handgun – shooting them at close range.

Also killed in the same building was student Angela Denise Dales, 33. Three others were wounded.

As soon as the gunfire erupted, two students acting independently of one another, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, ran to their vehicles to retrieve firearms. Gross, an off-duty police officer in his home state of North Carolina, got his 9mm pistol and body armor. Bridges got out his .357 Magnum.

Bridges and Gross went back to the building where the shots were heard and as Odighizuwa exited, they approached from different angles. Bridges yelled for him to drop his weapon and the shooter was subdued by several unarmed students.

Gross went back to his car and got handcuffs to detain the shooter until police arrived.

Most news reports of the incident failed to mention the presence of two armed students and their role in subduing the shooter, saying only that he was tackled by bystanders.

Odighizuwa was tried for the murders and sentenced to multiple life terms in prison.

Virginia Tech, like many of the nation's schools and college campuses, is a so-called "gun-free zone," which Second Amendment supporters say invites gun violence – especially from disturbed individuals seeking to kill as many victims as possible.

Foreign-born student Cho Seung-Hui murdered 32 and wounded another 15 before turning his gun on himself.

A year earlier, the Virginia legislature banned all guns on campus in the interest of safety.

CHO, Virginia Tech, Modern Psychiatry, and Drugs

I figured I would import this list of the most known school – as well as others – killings. Anti-depressant drugs are specifically the link between them all.

The New York Times has reported the killer was on a prescription medication, and authorities have said he was confined briefly several years ago for a mental episode.

They also have confirmed that the "prescription drugs" found among his effects related to the treatment of psychological problems.

Dr. Peter Breggin, a prominent critic of psychiatric drugs and founder of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, said even if Cho wasn't taking psychiatric drugs the day of the shooting, "he might have been tipped over into violent madness weeks or months earlier by a drug like Prozac, Paxil, or Zoloft."

While media reports have focused on guns and gun laws, Cho's violent writings and autistic behavior at Virginia Tech and the delay in notifying students and faculty of the beginnings of the shootings, there are those who say the focus should be on his medical history.

"In my book 'Reclaiming Our Children,' I analyzed the clinical and scientific reasons for believing that Eric Harris's violence was caused by prescribed Luvox and I've also testified to the same under oath in depositions in a case related to Columbine," Breggin wrote, referring to the 1999 tragedy when Harris and classmate Dylan Klebold shot and bombed students at the Colorado school until a dozen were dead.

"In my book "The Antidepressant Fact Book," I also warned that stopping antidepressants can be as dangerous as starting them, since they can cause very disturbing and painful withdrawal reactions," he added.

The TeenScreenTruth website, dealing with the campaign to "screen" children for "problems" and then prescribe drugs, has documented an extended list of violent episodes believed connected to the use of psychiatric drugs.

They range as far back as 1985, when Atlanta postal worker Steven W. Brownlee, who had been getting psychotropic drugs, pulled a gun and shot and killed a supervisor and a clerk.

Among the specifically school-related attacks the site documents are:

• In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann, who had been taking Anafranil and Lithium, walked into a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill., and began shooting. One child was killed and six wounded.

• Later that same year, 19-year-old James Wilson went on a shooting rampage at the Greenwood, S.C., Elementary School and killed two 8-year-old girls and wounded seven others. He'd been on Xanax, Valium and five other drugs.

• Kip Kinkel, a 15-year-old of Springfield, Ore., in 1998 murdered his parents and proceeded to his high school where he went on a rampage killing two students and wounding 22 others. Kinkel had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.

• Patrick Purdy, 25, in 1989 opened fire on a school yard filled with children in Stockton, Calif. Five kids were killed and 30 wounded. He been treated with Thorazine and Amitriptyline.

• Steve Lieth of Chelsea, Mich., in 1993 walked into a school meeting and shot and killed the school superintendent, wounding two others, while on Prozac.

• 10-year-old Tommy Becton in 1996 grabbed his 3-year-old niece as a shield and aimed a shotgun at a sheriff's deputy who accompanied a truant officer to his Florida home. He'd been put on Prozac.

• Michael Carneal, 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in Heath High in West Paducah, Ky. Three died and one was paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.

• In 1998, 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 14-year-old Mitchell Johnson apparently faked a fire alarm at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., and shot at students as they left the building. Four students and a teacher were killed. The boys were believed to be on Ritalin.

• In 1999, Shawn Cooper, 15, of Notus, Idaho, took a shotgun to school and injured one student. He had been taking Ritalin.

• April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 24 others. Harris had been taking Luvox.

• Todd Smith walked into as high school in Taber, Alberta, Canada in 1999 with a shotgun and killed one and injured a second student. He has been given a drug after a five-minute phone consultation with a psychiatrist.

• Steven Abrams drove his car into a preschool playground in 1999 in Costa Mesa., Calif., killing two. He was on probation with a requirement to take Lithium.

• In 2000, T.J. Solomon, 15, opened fire at Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga., while on a mix of antidepressants. Six were wounded.

• The same year Seth Trickey of Gibson, Okla., 13, was on a variety of prescriptions when he opened fire on his middle-school class, injuring five.

• Elizabeth Bush, 14, was on Prozac. She shot and wounded another student at Bishop Neumann High in Williamsport, Pa.

• Jason Hoffman, 18, in 2001 was on Effexor and Celexa, both antidepressants, when he wounded two teachers at California's Granite Hills High School.

• In Wahluke, Wash., Cory Baadsgaard, 16, took a rifle to his high schooland held 23 classmates hostage in 2001. He has been taking Paxil and Effexor.

• In Tokyo in 2001, Mamoru Takuma, 37, went into a second-grade classroom and started stabbing students. He killed eight. He had taken 10 times his normal dosage of an antidepressant.

• Duane Morrison, 53, shot and killed a girl at Platte Canyon High School in Colorado in 2006. Antidepressants later were found in his vehicle.

• In 2005, 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac when he shot and killed nine people and wounding five before committing suicide.

• Another case involving a school-age youth – although not at a school – happened in 1986, when 14-year-old Rod Mathews of Canton, Mass., beat a classmate to death with a baseball bat while on Ritalin.

And just a few among the dozens of incidents cited, but not apparently related to schools:

• William Cruse in 1987 was charged with killing six people in Palm Bay, Fla., after taking psychiatric drugs for "several years."

• The same year, Bartley James Dobben killed his two young sons by throwing them into a 1,300-degree foundry ladle. He been on a "regimen" of psychiatric drugs.

• Joseph T. WesBecker, 47, just a month after he began taking Prozac, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Ky., killing nine. Eli Lilly, which makes Prozac, later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.

• In 1991, 61-year-old Barbara Mortenson, on Prozac for two weeks, "cannibalized her 87-year-old mother …"

• In 1992, Lynnwood Drake III, shot and killed six in San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay. Prozac and Valium were found in his system.

• Sixteen-year-old Victor Brancaccio attacked and killed an 81-year-old woman, covered her corpse with red spray-paint. He was two months into a Zoloft regimen.

• While on four medications including Prozac, Dr. Debora Green in 1995 set her Prairie Village, Mo., home on fire, killing her children, ages 6 and 13.

• Kurt Danysh, 18, shot and killed his father in 1996, 17 days after his first dose of Prozac. "I didn't realize I did it until after it was done. … This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun."

• In 1998, GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Paxil, was ordered to pay $6.4 million to surviving family members after Donald Schnell, 60, just 48 hours after taking Paxil, flew into a rage and killed his wife, daughter and granddaughter.

• The website also cites psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, in a speech advocating for the treatment of children and youth.

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, towards our elected officials, towards his parents, towards a belief in a supernatural being, and towards the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future," Pierce told a 1973 childhood seminar.

WND Article

Why Did The Shooter Do What He Did?

By John Hawkins

Friday, April 20, 2007

Townhal.com Article – John Hawkins

After we read about a serial killer or mass murderer, the first question people always ask is, "Why?" What set him off? Why did he kill all those innocent people? Unfortunately, no matter how many different ways you try to fill in the blanks, there's never going to be a satisfying answer.

Want to blame music or video games? Well, okay, how many people listened to those same songs or played those same games and didn't go on a murderous rampage? In almost every case, you're talking about millions of people. So, even when you do find someone like Sebastian Bosse, the crazed gunman in Germany who injured 37 and was known to be obsessed with "Counter-Strike," you have to think that he was attracted to the game because he was disturbed, not made disturbed by the game.

The same could be said of violent television shows and movies and probably will since it has been revealed that Cho Seung-Hui was apparently copying parts of a movie called Old Boy. But again, millions of people have probably seen that movie and it didn't produce a slew of murders. So, it's not the movie, it's the person.

What about the killer's rants against the rich? That's exactly the sort of thing you'd find at liberal websites like the Democratic Underground and Daily Kos, isn't it? Sure, but if hating the rich turned people into mass murderers, then there are 30 or 40 million liberals who would have already gone on killing sprees

Other people -- liberals again -- will point to guns as the cause of the crime. But, if guns cause crime, then they must malfunction 99.9% of the time because law abiding Americans with guns are very seldom dangers to their fellow citizens. That's because guns don't cause crime; they're just tools -- and they're particularly dangerous tools when a person like Cho Seung-Hui has one and his fellow citizens are banned from having weapons of their own. If you want a perfect example of how gun control puts decent people at the mercy of criminals, you really don't need to look any further than what happened at Va. Tech.

Well, if it wasn't video games, guns, violence put out by Hollywood, liberal morals, or guns, why did Cho Seung-Hui do what he did? It must be goth culture, Dungeons and Dragons, bullies, or something else like that. Right? Wrong. The world's full of goths, people who play D&D, and people who are bullied. How many of them snap and murder 32 of their classmates for no discernible reason?

Here's the thing: you're never going to get a satisfactory answer that explains why Cho Seung-Hui did what he did. How could you? What is the reasonable explanation for why a run-of-the-mill college student decided to walk into a building full of strangers, chain the doors shut, and then gun them down? There isn't one.

What you have here is a strange, seriously disturbed individual who frightened some of his fellow students and teachers with his writing and behavior. His behavior and his thinking were not normal and so you can't reason them out normally. Were he still alive, perhaps you could sit him down with a psychologist for a few months and tease some sort of twisted rationale out of him, but it wouldn't make sense -- not in the way that we want it to.

In a situation like this, we want to know the exact events that set the murderer off so we can stop people like Cho Seung-Hui before they kill again. But, in the spiderweb of a mass murderer's mind, you never know what sort of muddled thinking and bizarre associations may be present.Seung-Hui could have been upset because he fantasized about a girl and she didn't give him the time of day, because of bad grades, or even because of a misinterpreted remark that the average person wouldn't have thought about for two seconds. On the other hand, despite all of his planning, if Seung-Hui had a happier week, he may have never gone through with his plans to murder those students.

The reality is that we're never going to really understand the "why" behind Seung-Hui's actions any more than we truly understand why Klebold and Harris murdered kids at Columbine, Ed Gein had a necklace made out of human lips, or why Ted Bundy eventually chose to rape and murder his way across the country.

You can chalk it up to evil. Psychologists and profilers can study these cases to see what they can learn, but don't expect it to really ever make sense because there's not going to be a rational, logical explanation behind it.

33 Stones?

Besides all the crazy Mason’s seeing a connection, I am at a loss of words for why there would be 33-stones. That would mean the school placed a stone for Cho, the killer. This wouldn’t necessarily surprise me because I am sure in our politically-correct/victim mentality… placing a stone for a psychotic murderer shouldn’t really surprise us.

I mean Cho was a victim too. Right?

Va. Tech Gunman's Family Feel Hopeless

Las Vegas Sun – AP Story

Meanwhile, at Virginia Tech, hundreds of somber students and area residents, most wearing the school's maroon and orange, stood with heads bowed at a memorial on the Drillfield in front of Norris Hall, where most of the victims in Monday's massacre died. Along with the bouquets and candles was a yellow sign covered in maroon and orange handprints, bearing the words "Never forgotten."

"It's good to feel the love of people around you," said Alice Lo, an alumna and friend of Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French instructor killed in the rampage. "With this evil, there is still goodness."

The mourners gathered in front of simple stone memorials, each adorned with a basket of tulips and an American flag. There were 33 stones - one for each victim and Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old gunman who took their lives.

Democrats Blame Republicans for, Well, Everything!

(Hot Air Props)

I couldn’t imagine having a President like Biden… he’s nuts. This shows an almost psychotic yield to politics and a conspiratorial belief. Rove is involved in everything that happens in Washington. The government was involved in 9/11. Whatever this metastasis is it shows that the democratic base is unhinged.

Speaking at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network event in New York, Biden said President Bush, Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove are responsible for what he called “the politics of polarization.”

Biden said Republicans have created an environment that brings bad things to the United States.

“I would argue, since 1994 with the Gingrich revolution, just take a look at Iraq, Venezuela, Katrina, what’s gone down at Virginia Tech, Darfur, Imus. Take a look. This didn’t happen accidentally, all these things,” he said.

Hot Air Blog

Being a comparative religious man, I could almost interpret this as a New Age quote, almost Kucinich like. If you compare the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, the New Age movement is much more prominent in the Democrat party. This has some consequences for both the poli-sci guy as well as the person who studies eschatology. Most New Agers believe that they are God, or divine, I will give just one example from a book Whole Foods sells and is the number best seller:

Byrne's book (The Secret) centers on her teaching that every object and mind in the universe operates at a certain frequency. Tune your mind to the object you desire, and it will be attracted to you. Why? Because you are the center of the universe. "You are God in a physical body," she writes. "You are spirit in the flesh. You are Eternal Life expressing itself as You. You are a cosmic being. You are all power. You are all wisdom. You are all intelligence. You are perfection. You are magnificence."

New Agers also believe that if everyone “visualized” peace all at once, it will happen. So I almost see that Biden is sensing a “bad karma” coming from Republicans and affecting even weather. At any rate, we can see (below) that conspiracies run rampant in the Democratic Party.

Best of the Web Today brings to our attention a new Pew poll done for the Council on Foreign Relations. Among the interesting findings of this poll are these:

51% of Democrats say that US "wrongdoing" might have motivated the 9/11 attacks…. In contrast, only 17% of Republicans in the poll are this amazingly stupid.

These are the people who buy-into the whole MoveOn.org, Left-wing, Koolaid-swilling nonsense… the… Bushitler/Blood4Oil/Bushlied (hattip to JawaReport). Another survey (says) done was the Scripps Howard/Ohio University, this poll found that a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East…. The poll [also] found that [m]embers of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.

Religio-Political Blog

Ethnic minorities, high school diploma workers (grocery stores, line workers… union jobs) are mainly democrats, which is why “and Democrats” is a repeating of the first two groups. Morons I say!

9/11-Truthers and Virginia Tech

I am sure that all the 9/11-truthers will come out and make some connection between big-oil, Rove, Bush, conspiracies and the like as a way to cause some news commotion so that the Gonzales testimony will go unnoticed.