[flagged]

▲ 0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That's why school shootings pretty much never happened before the 1970s

School shootings didn't happen for multiple reasons that are not SSRIs:

  - Semi-automatic and automatic weapons weren't available to the public
  - There were no video games and few movies glorifying a lone gunman "getting revenge" on a society that spurned them (there movies about gangsters, or war movies)
  - There was no anti-American/facist "militia/tactical" cultural meme
  - There was not yet any widely known stories of suicide-by-cop and fame via mass-murder
  - The American cultural ethos had not yet turned cynical; once Vietnam and Nixon's betrayal happened, it was all downhill
  - We stopped locking up crazy people in insane asylums
  - Social isolation and urbanism increased population density and animosity

	▲	dabluecaboose 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> - Semi-automatic and automatic weapons weren't available to the public They were fully available to the public. Automatic weapons were tax-gated, but still were (and are!) available, after 1934. Semi-automatic weapons have been freely available to any citizen pretty much since they were invented (circa 1893).

▲ m-hodges 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That's why school shootings pretty much never happened before the 1970s

This claim is gonna need a lot more evidence.

▲

logicchains 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Here's from Wikipedia all the mass shootings conducted by students prior to the 1970s. They're incredibly infrequent compared to the shootings of today,

March 26, 1893 – Plain Dealing, Louisiana (Plain Dealing High School): During an evening school dance, a fight broke out. Students fired shots, killing two immediately, fatally wounding two more, and injuring a professor (total: 4 killed, 1 wounded).

December 12, 1898 – Charleston, West Virginia: Young men (including students/former students in the context of a school exhibition) disrupted an event, leading to a brawl with gunfire. At least 6 killed (including students) and 4+ wounded in the chaos.

July 21, 1903 – Jackson, Kentucky (Cave Run School): Students James Barrett and Mack Howard dueled with pistols over a card game, killing each other; a 12-year-old bystander student was wounded (total: 2 killed, 1 wounded).

November 16, 1904 – Riverside, California (Indian School): A gunfight between pupils resulted in one student killed, another fatally wounded, and one wounded (total: 2 killed, 1 wounded).

October 8, 1950 – New Orleans, Louisiana (Booker T. Washington High School): Suspected gangsters (youths tied to students) fired on each other; 6 bystanders wounded.

May 5, 1956 – Seat Pleasant, Maryland (Maryland Park Junior High School): 15-year-old student Billy Ray Prevatte returned with a rifle after a reprimand and shot staff: 1 teacher killed, 2 injured (total: 3 victims).

October 17, 1961 – Denver, Colorado (Morey Junior High School): 14-year-old Tennyson Beard argued with a classmate, shot and wounded him, then fatally shot another student (total: 1 killed, 1–2 wounded).

October 5, 1966 – Grand Rapids, Minnesota (Grand Rapids High School): 15-year-old student David Black killed a school administrator and seriously wounded another student (total: 1 killed, 1 wounded).

▲

m-hodges 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wasn’t asking for evidence of the number of mass shootings. I was asking for evidence of “that’s why”.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		logicchains' "evidence" is one of the most ridiculous styles of argument I see more and more frequently in social media, so thank you for calling them out on it. They made a very specific, unsupported claim, and then when you requested evidence of that, they responded with a completely unrelated set of information that in no way supported their original claim, as if a longer response someone makes their argument more credible. I don't know if it's AI slop or human slop, but it's total slop regardless.

▲

anigbrowl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One could just as easily blame the change on the availability of color TV, or cultural shifts that took place in the 1960s.

▲

bflesch 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Correlation != Causation

I invite you to scientifically work on this important topic. Catch up on previous work by others and then use a proper statistical methodology to do proper research and validate your hypothesis.

Other possible factors that could explain it apart from your theory on SSRIs: more exhaustive news reporting, less wealthy parents and thereby more kids brought up in poverty conditions, more parents with lead poisoning, more kids exposed to plastics, more weapons per household, more exposure to violence and/or mobbing, violence in video games, less third places that kids have for socializing, more social media, more mobbing at school, more unrealistic beauty standards and many others. Some of them might've been researched already and some might not.

Even though you're not trying to do a degree you can always do proper science and maybe also prove a novel explanation.

▲ Topfi 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SSRIs are a first line treatment across many EU countries too, yet we somehow manage.

	▲	vjvjvjvjghv 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When I grew up in Germany, I had some pretty bad phases during my teens. I wonder if I had had easy access to guns together with lots of information and videos about shooters on the internet, maybe I would have thought about that too. I didn't have any of those so I sometimes thought about suicide but never about shooting others. The US has a combination of SSRIs (maybe that's a factor, we don't know for sure), easy access to guns, gun culture, glorification of violence and vigilantism and over the last decades a lot of school shooters to imitate. Basically a ton of risk factors combined.

▲ iririririr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

man, to repeat this (obviously flawed) argument as your own... you are really down a very bad path of pernicious podcasts. reevaluate some values.

▲ brisket_bronson 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One: Correlation does not imply causation, two: SSRIs are available worldwide

▲ mapontosevenths 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Everything you said is here is wildly and completely inaccurate and seems to be based on fringe conspiracy theorist RFK Jr's thoroughly debunked lies.

The exact opposite is true. Countries with the highest SSRI use have the lowest mass shooting rates. The evidence doesn't lie. Politicians do.

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/10/rfk-jr-misleads-about-anti...

▲

zephen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To be scrupulously fair, the SSRI thing was a conspiracy theory well before RFK Jr. came into the spotlight.

▲

logicchains 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	m-hodges 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The article you linked does not support the claim you made. It argues that antidepressants may be associated with aggression or violent behavior in a small susceptible subset. That is very different from “SSRIs explain the rise of school shootings.” The “most school shooters were on SSRIS” claim has been studied directly: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31513302/ Their conclusion: “most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications - and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.”
	▲	dualvariable 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> That's a stupid comparison because other countries have much less firearm ownership. Okay, let's try being slightly less permissive in our firearm laws then, since you've just proven it works.
	▲	xnyan 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> other countries have much less firearm ownership. Interesting. Why do you think countries with lower firearm ownership rates have fewer shootings?
	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	antinomicus 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Lmao but the first part of your comment really shows the true reason other countries don’t have shootings…because they regulate guns…. So yea maybe some super rare cases of ssri aggression are real but by your own admission the solution to it is gun control.