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Last week, the Associated Press reported that Colorado church shooter Matthew Murray had been taking antidepressants. The same is true for Omaha mall shooter Robert Hawkins, recent Finland school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen, Jeff Weise of Minnesota, Columbine's Eric Harris, and virtually every other school/mall/church/college mass murderer. We never saw these types of shootings before Prozac came out in 1988, and antidepressants now all have FDA-mandated black-box labels warning that they can cause suicide and violent actions.

Some say these shootings occurred because the killers were mentally ill. Yet people have suffered mental illness for centuries and there is no regular reported pattern of them committing mass murder before 1988. Others feel it is a gun issue. Certainly guns are a convenient weapon of choice. However, women reacting to antidepressants often use a knife, arson, or drowning, and the targets are usually their children. Andrea Yates was on Effexor when she killed her kids. If we look beyond school shootings, we see a consistent and recurring pattern of violence caused by people on antidepressants.

The relationship between antidepressants and violent, suicidal thoughts was mentioned in "Emergence of Intense Suicidal Preoccupation During Fluoxetine Treatment,"a study on Prozac by Martin Teicher published in 1990 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. "Six depressed patients free of recent serious suicidal ideation developed intense, violent suicidal preoccupation after two to seven weeks of fluoxetine treatment. This state persisted for as little as three days to as long as three months after discontinuation of fluoxetine. None of these patients had ever experienced a similar state during treatment with any other psychotropic drug."

Thought-provoking public service videos about kids put on antidepressants can be seen at www.CCHR.org.

Ernest Ryan

Temperance

Troubled kids, guns a fatal combination

It happens again and all we are left with are more questions.

A young man, 19 years old, is described as quiet, troubled, with a drinking problem, possibly a drug problem, and having been treated for depression and attention deficit.

He had been in trouble with the law and rejected by his family. Then he lost his girlfriend and his job.

The family he lived with described him as so quiet and nonthreatening that they were not concerned when this young man showed them an SKS semiautomatic rifle the night before he went to a mall, killed eight people, wounded more, and then took his own life.

Why weren't people concerned that a 19-year-old depressed and rejected young man had an assault weapon? Who sold or gave him the gun? Why don't we see something wrong with the availability of this kind of lethal weapon to a 19-year-old?

The gun people are imagining they could have all been armed and "taken him out" before he shot those people. The people who were there described it as only taking moments. Semiautomatic assault weapons can do that, sometimes capable of firing more than 120 bullets in less than a minute.

Troubled youth, available powerful weapons, and yet we do nothing to prevent the results.

Why are we afraid to try to fix either?

Toby Hoover

Executive Director
Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence

Glorifying shooters encourages others

My congratulations to Mona Charen for her column entitled "Media should deny recognition to fame-seeking mass killers."

I have long felt that elevating killers to celebrity status by publishing their photos, messages, and manifestos, just serves to encourage the next deranged person to seek fame the same way. Of course we need to inform the public of these horrific crimes, but it is irresponsible to glorify the perpetrators.

I agree with Mona Charen that the news media need to adopt a journalistic convention of not identifying killers and terrorists.

Shirley Rentz

Temperance

Columnist's advice good on mass killers

The headline of Mona Charen's Dec. 12 column was, "Media should deny recognition to fame-seeking mass killers."

I would hope the editors of The Blade and the producers of our local TV stations would comply.

Wayne W. Kohn

Holland

Other amendments suffer in 1939 ruling

The Blade's Dec. 4 guest editorial stated that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution "means what it says" and that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is a collective right of "the people" not an individual right. This is based on a 1939 Supreme Court decision that the editorial states, "rejected the notion of an individual right to possess guns for purposes unrelated to state militias."

If this is indeed true, you'd better be ready for some real changes in the way things happen around here.

If "the people" in the Second Amendment are only the collective people and not individuals, then one must, logically and legally, apply the same principle to the rights of "the people" where that term is used elsewhere in the amendments. Therefore the rights guaranteed by the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, which are also stated as rights of "the people," must be collective rights - not an individual right.

If The Blade will agree that right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly, the right to security from unreasonable search without a warrant, etc., are not individuals rights but only collective rights, then I will concede that the right to keep and bear arms is not an individual right. Is that not reasonable?

Incidentally, the 1939 case was based on the claim by two men that the Second Amendment gave them the right to own sawed-off shotguns, not the issue of whether individuals can own normal, legitimate, contemporary firearms for self defense, hunting, and the safety of the collective people.

Ian W. Iott

Monclova Township

Look to root cause to fix real problem

Like most people in this country, I was shocked by the recent shootings in a Nebraska shopping mall, and my heart goes out to the victims' families. However, I am equally disturbed by the reactions of some people around the country. Within days of the incident, we were seeing articles and news reports on the inadequacy of mall security in America. Before long, I'm sure we will see more security cameras, more security guards, and who knows what else.

The same thing happened after the shooting sprees at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. It didn't take long for the politicians and the media to call for greater security in schools.

Maybe greater security in public areas is warranted, but I am constantly reminded of a story I heard in college. In the story, a community at the bottom of a mountain road wanted to help the people whose cars ran off the road and crashed at the bottom of the hill. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for new emergency vehicles and personnel, when all they really needed to do was spend a few hundred dollars on a guard rail at the top of the hill. The moral of the story - to fix something properly, you need to fix the root cause of the problem.

Before we turn our schools and shopping malls into the equivalent of high security prisons, why don't we concern ourselves with how these young people get their hands on rifles and handguns in the first place? Most of the shooters had exhibited classic behavioral symptoms before they went on their shooting sprees.

Why don't we put more money and time into spotting these signs before something terrible happens? We need to be proactive in these situations, not reactive.

Will Moss

Perrysburg

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