The One Thing That Links Almost All Massacres And Acts Of Terrorism?

By TruePublica: It’s interesting to note that since the Sandy Hook killings on December 14th 2012, just over 150,000 American’s have been killed by guns, almost double that figure have ended in non-fatal injuries. The number of American’s killed by refugees in America in the same time – zero. There’s a point to making this comparison.

 

It’s also interesting to note that opioids, both prescription and black-market, kills about the same amount of American’s – approximately 36,000 a year. A recent U.S. STAT-Forecast says – “Opioids could kill nearly half a million people across America over the next decade as the crisis of addiction and overdose accelerates.

Drug abuse and addiction more generally is associated with a high percentage of drug-related crimes. The Bureau of Justice reports that approximately 41% of all violent crimes against students are the result of drug abuse, the same is experienced by 35% of workplace victims. In the U.S. several jurisdictions have reported that benzodiazepine misuse by criminal detainees has surpassed that of opiates. Research carried out on drug-related crime found that drug misuse is associated with various crimes that are in part related to the feelings of invincibility, which can become particularly pronounced with abuse. In fact, there are an assortment of drugs that have been used as a tool of murder by serial killers, and other murderers, and used to facilitate rape, robbery and shoplifting.

 

There are 29 listed acts of terrorism in the US since Sandy Hook (itself not classed as an act of terrorism). Twenty two of those incidents ended with no fatalities, albeit most ended with non-fatal injuries of some sort. The Orlando nightclub killing spree, the deadliest in American history and San Berdino were both perpetrated by American born citizens. These two incidents alone account for more than half of all terror related fatalities combined. Others were acts of racism, hatred and just plain violence for one reason or another and classed as terrorism. Orlando was carried out by a psychotic bully with a list of aggressive behavioural traits and low attainment throughout his youth and adult life and was a drug abuser. Drugs were also involved in San Berdino. The male was a drug abuser who had a ‘troubled’ childhood, with an abusive as well as violent father – an alcoholic who once even attempted to kill his wife in front of the three children by pushing her in front of a car.

In the last 24 hours:

PARIS (Assoc Press) – 1.40pm 21st August: The Latest on a van ramming two bus stops in the French port city of Marseille (all times local): A French official says a suspect who rammed his white van into two bus stops in the southern French city of Marseille, killing a woman, is being treated for psychological problems. Watch this space, drugs will be involved.

The mainstream media have emphatically failed to bring to everyone’s attention that the car attack in Charlottesville that killed one and wounded 19 others was perpetrated by a very troubled army reject who was using potent antipsychotic drugs after being diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. This is a material fact but rejected as such.

The following blog post by Peter Hitchins of the MailonSunday entitled “And still idiots accuse me of excusing Islamic terror. They should read this” is interesting. The post, including links and other material is thousands of words and heavily researched over an extensive period of time. To read it all would literally take hours. In one excerpt of some 500 words, the focus is on the implication that far from a concerted effort by Islamic State, to bring down Europe and continue its push for the ‘clash of civilisations’ to divide the world, something else might be going on.

 

Hitchins goes to considerable lengths to forcefully get the point across every few hundred words that he is not defending Islam or taking sides with the perpetrators of death on our streets.   TruePublica has made the assumption that Hitchins has done his homework here and what you read are indeed facts. That being the case, he makes a good point. Have a read, see what you think.

 

“And I thought that one of the most important questions we face is this: How can we prevent or at least reduce the horrifying number of rampage murders across the world?  Let me suggest that we might best do so by thinking, and studying. A strange new sort of violence is abroad in the world. From Japan to Florida to Texas to France to Germany, Norway and Finland, we learn almost weekly of wild massacres, in which the weapon is sometimes a gun, sometimes a knife, or even a lorry.

In one case the pilot of an airliner deliberately flew his craft into a hillside and slaughtered everyone on board. But the victims are always wholly innocent – and could have been us.

I absolutely do not claim to know the answer to this. But I have, with the limited resources at my disposal, been following up as many of these cases as I can, way beyond the original headlines.

Those easiest to follow are the major tragedies, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Nice, Orlando, Munich and Paris killings, the Anders Breivik affair and the awful care-home massacre in Japan last week. These are covered in depth. Facts emerge that do not emerge in more routine crimes, even if they are present.

Let me tell you what I have found. Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma bomber, used cannabis and methamphetamine. Anders Breivik took the steroid Stanozolol and the quasi-amphetamine ephedrine. Omar Mateen, culprit of the more recent Orlando massacre, also took steroids, as did Raoul Moat, who a few years ago terrorised the North East of England. So did the remorseless David Bieber, who killed a policeman and nearly murdered two others on a rampage in Leeds in 2003.

Eric Harris, one of the culprits of the Columbine school shooting, took the SSRI antidepressant Luvox. His accomplice Dylan Klebold’s medical records remain sealed, as do those of several other school killers. But we know for sure that Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake Senior High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’. So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder US President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and is now being prepared for release. So had Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who murdered all his passengers last year. The San Bernardino killers had been taking the benzodiazepine Xanax and the amphetamine Adderall.

The killers of Lee Rigby were (like McVeigh) cannabis users. So was the killer of Canadian soldier Nathan Cirillo in 2014 in Ottawa (and the separate killer of another Canadian soldier elsewhere in the same year). So was Jared Loughner, culprit of a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. So was the Leytonstone Tube station knife attacker last year. So is Satoshi Uematsu, filmed grinning at Japanese TV cameras after being accused of a horrible knife rampage in a home for the disabled in Sagamihara.

I know that many wish to accept the simple explanation that recent violence is solely explained by Islamic fanaticism. No doubt it’s involved. Please understand that I am not trying to excuse or exonerate terrorism when I say what follows. But when I checked the culprits of the Charlie Hebdo murders, all had drugs records or connections. The same was true of the Bataclan gang, of the Tunis beach killer and of the Thalys train terrorist.

It is also true of the two young men who murdered a defenceless and aged priest near Rouen last week. One of them had also been hospitalised as a teenager for mental disorders and so almost certainly prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs. THE Nice killer had been smoking marijuana and taking mind-altering prescription drugs, almost certainly ‘antidepressants’.

As an experienced Paris journalist said to me on Friday: ‘After covering all of the recent terrorist attacks here, I’d conclude that the hit-and-die killers involved all spent the vast majority of their miserable lives smoking cannabis while playing hugely violent video games.’

Now look at the German events, eclipsed by Rouen. The Ansbach suicide bomber had a string of drug offences. So did the machete killer who murdered a woman on a train in Stuttgart. The Munich shopping mall killer had spent months in a mental hospital being treated (almost certainly with drugs) for depression and anxiety.

Here is my point. We know far more about these highly publicised cases than we do about most crimes. Given that mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, are present in so many of them, shouldn’t we be enquiring into the possibility that the link might be significant in a much wider number of violent killings? And, if it turns out that it is, we might be able to save many lives in future. Isn’t that worth a little thought and effort?”

Read Peter Hitchins full story HERE

 

 

 

 

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