…

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0802f.asp

“There is simply no way on Earth the Anti-Federalists would have surrendered to the new and mistrusted government the right to own any gun they wanted at any time they wanted in any number they wanted.

To believe differently, to believe that the Second Amendment actually gives the federal government the authority to regulate firearms, one must believe the absolutely unbelievable. One must believe that the Anti-Federalists, fearing and loathing federal power, compelled Madison to compose this laundry list of rights, this list of things over which the government was to have no authority and, very near the very top of the list, these people in fear of the federal government desired a clause that reads, “Despite the fact that Article I, Section 8 does not empower you federal government people to infringe our firearms rights, we hereby correct that mistake and surrender to you a right which we previously held, but wish now to give away.”

We must further believe that James Madison was such a monumentally incompetent and abysmal writer that, when trying to give the federal government this new authority to regulate the private ownership of firearms, the last fourteen words of the Amendment read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

We must also believe that revolutionary American history conceals some hitherto unknown and utterly undocumented groundswell of public desire for gun control.

Picture in your mind for a moment the rough-and-tumble individualist who gave birth to this nation, a man who had tamed a wilderness, fought Indian wars on and off for 180 years, and successfully faced down the world’s mightiest empire. Hold a picture of that man in your head for a moment and then try to imagine his being told that this new federal government would have the power to regulate his ownership of firearms in any manner it saw fit, including imprisoning him for possession of any firearm for any reason at any time.

No honest or serious person could ever claim to believe that any part of the American electorate in the 1700s desired federal gun control, let alone the Anti-Federalists who forced the creation of the Bill of Rights.”

And while the dataset here is too small to be significant, there has been other research in this area:
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http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/addiction-withdrawal.htm

http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1998/TeenageViolence.html
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Of course, I am committing the hubris of discussing your own profession. Is there something I haven’t noticed which invalidates my hypothesis?

On the other hand, there’s some troubling evidence of a rise in violence, especially suicide, in those actually taking antidepressants.

http://angam.blogspot.com/2007/04/worst-mass-murder.html
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For those of you who are sick of passivists’ “the police should protect everyone”–and for passivists as well, I recommend the following light reading:

http://www.philelmore.com/download-beamartialist/Be_A_Martialist.pdf
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Finally, neo, given the fact that both the Virginia and Illinois college murderers involved people who had been on anti-depressants… Am I out of line in suggesting that we re-think the pharmacy of anti-depressant medication? Perhaps look for a solution which doesn’t involve altering brain chemistry toward sociopathy?

I formerly thought that was a stupid phrase, but now I see its truth: those who want to commit crimes will commit crimes, no matter how difficult society makes it. If the U.S. were to ban guns entirely, is it reasonable to think that guns would not be available to any purchaser with money in Mexico? Do we think that individuals unstable enough to want to kill innocents on a school campus would be deterred from traveling south of the border?

Really, how foolish do we have to be to believe that crime can be stopped simply by legislating against it? Has it worked so far? Did it work during Prohibition? Or did that failed legislation create more crime?

Conversely, it’s been shown that citizens with their own legally-obtained and used firearms can and do prevent further bloodshed with the ability to stop crazies in the throes of mass shooting incidents, and crime has been shown to decrease in states where concealed carry is allowed.

Am I advocating a return to the Wild West, where everyone was armed? Not necessarily–but I’ll wager that crime was actually lower per capita when the “bad guys” knew that the “good guys” had just as much firepower as they.

– Negrodamus