School Shootings – A Root Cause Analysis (Hint: It’s not the guns)

If your engine broke down on the drive home from work this evening, would you immediately file a lawsuit against the gas station at which you last filled up your tank?  No, that would be ridiculous – while bad gas could be an issue that would cause your engine to break down, it’s merely a single variable from a long list of things that could cause the damage.

So why is it that everytime there’s a school or mass shooting event the media, politicians and celebrities from the left automatically single out a single variable without any further analysis into the root cause of the issue – especially when there are two glaring variables which have a much higher correlation to these terrible tragedies.

There are three main variables which seem to be consistent with each of these events: guns, teenagers on antidepressants and teenage boys raised in a fatherless home. Unlike the talking heads in the media, grandstanding politicians and clueless celebrities, we will take an in-depth look at each of these variables to see which one seems more likely to be the root cause, to see if we can actually help fix the issue.

Guns

As Rahm Emanuel famously said, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Following this mantra, the same variable is automatically blamed for each school or mass-shooting event around the world.

But there are a few major indications that this couldn’t possibly be the issue. Firstly, we look at the timeline to see when these events started to occur. The Columbine Shooting occurred on April 20, 1999 in Columbine, Colorado, and is often referred to as the start to what became an all too often event in our nation.

If we are to truly look at causality in this event, we have to see which variables are most closely linked to that event. So we must ask: did guns suddenly become available, or more prevalent in households around that time?

The answer is a resounding no. Our nation was begun in armed rebellion against the tyrannical rule of a British monarchy, and since our inception the USA has been a nation with an armed citizenry. It’s interesting that many from the anti-2nd amendment camp use Britain as a case study for reducing gun violence by disarming the citizenry – but they never mention the drastic increase in knife violence and recently acid-throwing attacks, which means the overall level of violence didn’t decrease, merely a single tool used in violent attacks.

And of course I’m sure the very monarchy who lost control of our continent due to Americans with guns would absolutely love to see us disarmed.

So if guns have been prevalent in our nation since its inception, but these school and mass shootings are a relatively new phenomenon, how could one immediately jump to the conclusion that they are the root cause of this issue?

Teenagers on Antidepressants

If we’re looking at the three major variables as possible root causes, there is another variable which seems much more highly correlated to this tragedy upon our nation: over medicated teenagers.

The FDA issued a “black box” warning of SSRI’s (antidepressants) for teenagers in 2004 due to them being linked to an increase in suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens, and in some children antidepressants may also trigger anxiety, agitation, hostility, restlessness or impulsive behavior.

That warning, however, came long after these drugs had begun being prescribed in abundance to our teenagers.

The FDA issued this warning based on a review of 2,200 teenagers medical records, finding that these increased suicidal thoughts & behaviors appeared in approximately 4% of the study population, choosing to issue the “black box” warning rather than recalling the drugs because they assumed the benefit of the drugs outweighed the risks.

And wouldn’t you know it – the beginning of our teens being prescribed these same antidepressants is correlated to when the school & mass shootings started to occur.

Have you ever heard the media mention how many of the school shooters were on antidepressants?

It’s an alarmingly high number.

Here’s the single media voice we’ve come to trust in giving us an honest “Reality Check” on major issues talking about this.

Teenage Boys Raised in Fatherless Homes

I recently heard an interview on The Adam Carolla Show by Warren Farrell, PhD, author of the book The Boy Crisis. I bought his book immediately after listening, and hope that you will too.

Being a divorced father raising 4 kids (2 boys and 2 girls), there were a few statistics given by Dr. Farrell that were not only alarming, but also seem to correlate much more highly to school shooting events than guns…and you have to wonder why we don’t hear these stats more often:

90% of school shooters were teenage boys raised in fatherless homes

Over 90% of men in prison were raised in fatherless homes

Nearly every foreign ISIS recruit captured was raised in a fatherless home

In this interview, Dr. Farrell brings up another extremely salient point: if the true root cause of school shootings were the guns and nothing else, shouldn’t we see an even distribution of both teen boys AND girls as school shooters?

Yet nobody talks about this.

Now that the Mueller report has been submitted and Americans are beginning to discover that their media, politicians and loud-mouthed celebrities have been lying to them for two years, you really have to wonder…

What else have they been lying to us about?

And why have we never seen any of the above questions asked, nor statistics given during the wall-to-wall coverage after any school shooting event?

Robert Patrick Lewis is a Green Beret OIF/OEF combat veteran with 10th SFG(A), CMO of Heroes Media Group, entrepreneur, MBA and award-winning author of Love Me When I’m Gone: The True Story of Life, Love and Loss for A Green Beret In Post-9/11 War , The Pact and The Pact Book II: Battle Hymn of the Republic. Follow him @RobertPLewis on Twitter or on his RobertPatrickLewisAuthor Facebook page.