But the Left was scared that the counter insurgency methods used in Iraq would be applied to their cities. Good thing they got rid of that problem by sabotaging OIF.

Guessing that firearms are big factor, the fed. gun control history indicates that legislation after the assassinations JFK, RFK, MLK etc., 1968, clamped down significantly on guns like “Saturday night specials” only to be loosened in 1986. Some Sat. night specials were unsafe, and some were perfectly OK, just cheap.

Having a firearm in the house, especially a loaded one is a serious responsibility and many don’t take seriously enough. Plus many want that handgun in the nightstand ready to go at a moment’s notice.
______

I recall going on a big in-law family trip, including the two big Orlando theme parks and a Caribbean cruise, in Aug. 2003. The theme park workers talked about how we tourists were at the beginning of a travel resurgence after a tremendous post 9/11 tourism drought. I wonder if that could be connected to that curious blip in the 2004 suicide number? A bunker mentality in the collective unconscious?
______

The “professionals” that I’ve read definitely say that anti-depressants are a net positive in reducing suicides. But that is not inconsistent with a very tiny percentage becoming unhinged. Even if all of the spree/rampage killers are lumped together it is still a tiny percentage of the violent crime deaths. It is also very unlikely that drugs were a direct cause of the Las Vegas or Parkland shootings, even though both probably had exposure to anti-depressants. The former was too old, and the latter had been off his meds for a considerable while.

Frog: Critics claim SSRIs can cause violence towards others as well as suicide.

IMO it’s entirely possible in individual cases. Serotonin receptors are everywhere in the nervous system, we don’t understand the interactions as well as the PR suggests, thus the SSRI warning lists as long as your arm.

Dr. Peter Breggin led off his book, “Talking Back to Prozac,” with the case of a woman who developed tardive dyskinesia — uncontrollable tics, in her case facial — from Prozac. It’s unusual but it happens.

http://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/tardive-dyskinesia-highly-prevalent-with-certain-nonantipsychotic-medication

In aggregate however the effects of SSRIs are not a slam-dunk for harm or effectiveness. Some people do benefit and given the stakes of depression, that’s great news.

A trained physician is required. Treatment with SSRIs is often a trial-and-error journey to discover which SSRI at what dosage, possibly in combination with other drugs, best fits the individual patient at a given time.

-the suicide plot is pretty flat, and despite the cited high/low numbers, there are no statistical evaluations given.

-the homicide and firearm-death plots are rather parallel, the gap between them being pretty constant over time despite the transient big upward spike in both as shown. If one were a social “scientist”, one might thus propose that SSRIs caused homicides as well as suicides. That would make SSRIs and their evil Big Pharma makers doubly guilty.

I doubt SSRIs are “responsible” for either homicides and suicides. The bad news is that SSRIs are only twice as effective as placebos in relieving depression. Not exactly a big leap forward, though my brother the shrink dispenses them with both hands; even wanted our elderly mother, dying of cancer and heart disease, to take Risperdal in her last 90 days, because she musta been depressed.

neo: Some years ago I checked the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2005 violent crimes broken out by race for perp/victims and discovered jaw-dropping numbers for black-on-white vs white-on-black violence:

White-on-Black-completed-violence-cases: 9,025
Black-on-White–completed-violence-cases: 131,006

White-on-Black-sexual-assault-cases: 10
Black-on-White–sexual-assault-cases: 37,460

Thus even though whites outnumbered blacks by nearly a factor of six in 2005, black were committing violence against whites in far larger numbers. Going per capita, it’s much worse.

To a Martian observer it might appear blacks are waging an undeclared race war on whites.

A few years ago, after being annoyed by Ta-Nehisi Coates going on and on about whites “breaking the black body,” I went back to the BJS to check those numbers again and discovered the Obama administration had removed from the DOJ database all the breakouts, past and present, for perp/victim by race.

Fortunately I saved a pdf of the 2005 report.

‘More inmates, despite drop in crime’ was the famous headline.

Yes, I noticed that chart with the extremely high statistics for black homicides. And yet these days the left is only concerned about the tiny number that occur at the hands of police.

That chart is very sobering.

‘outright lies and the astroturfed hysteria’

And that is where social media comes in to repeat the lies and hysteria over and over and over.