Drugs, Guns And The Coming Storm

The Associated PressMop-topped, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof is charged with killed nine people in an historic church in Charleston, S.C., Wednesday.
The Associated PressMop-topped, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof is charged with killed nine people in an historic church in Charleston, S.C., Wednesday.

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The conversation about guns has too-few words Church shooting suspect previously arrested on drug charge

It didn't take long for Dylann Storm Roof to become the stereotype of the white Southern conservative.

The alleged slayer of nine people in a Charleston, S.C., church on Wednesday night "had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say," said former classmate John Mullins at White Knoll High School in Columbia, S.C. "Strong conservative beliefs."

The Southern Poverty Law Center republished positive comments on the shooting that had been posted posted on a racist message board, labeling them responses from the "racist right."

"White right-wing domestic terrorism," Chauncey DeVega of Salon.com posted on Twitter, "is one of the greatest threats to public safety and security in post 9/11 United States of America."

That rhetorical group-think is undistinguished, unhelpful and untrue.

Whatever Roof is, thinks or believes should not be used to paint the rest of one race, one region of the country or one political leaning.

Not much better was President Barack Obama's statement blaming the incident on the availability of guns.

"We don't have all the facts," he said, "but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun."

The only way to stop that would be to ban guns altogether. Even Obama's fellow travelers know that's not going to happen. And the president is fully aware that if there's anything short of a gun ban, someone who wants a gun badly enough is always going to get one.

Federal law, in fact, prohibited Roof from getting a gun because he had a felony charge pending against him. Early reports said his father gave him a .45-caliber pistol for his recent 21st birthday, but a later report said he may have bought it, which would have illegal for him at the time. Whether that .45 was the semiautomatic handgun police say was used in the Charleston shooting is as yet unknown.

Far below the white racist and gun availability angles of blame being put forth for the terroristic event is that of the alleged gunman's use of pharmaceutical drugs.

Roof reportedly was taking a drug called Suboxone, a narcotic used to treat opiate addiction.

He is among a number of recent mass slayers, including Columbine killer Eric Harris, "Batman" shooter James Holmes and Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza, who were taking some form of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) or other pharmaceutical at the time of their attack.

Suboxone is a habit-inducing drug connected with sudden bursts of aggression. Posts on various drug websites report about a user whose personality completely changed as a result of taking the drug, of how the drug sent another user into "self-destruct mode" and how a poster's husband "became violent, smashing things and threatening me" after coming off the drug.

Indeed, the website SSRI Stories documents hundreds of examples of mass shootings, murders and other episodes of violence committed by people on psychiatric drugs over the last 30 years.

The warnings about those drugs - " may cause shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, panic attacks, tuberculosis " - are what you hear the narrator ticking off in a very soft voice as the radio and television commercials play on picturing or describing the new life someone has found through the use of the drugs.

On Feb. 28, Roof was arrested for drug possession at a Columbia mall. According to various reports, a police incident document said he had strips of Suboxone. However, he did not have a prescription for the drug, which is commonly sold illegally on the street.

"He used drugs heavily a lot," his high school classmate Mullins said. "It was obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understand. Like Xanax, and stuff like that."

So did the drugs fuel the anxiety, the hate and the bigotry, which stoked the desire to use a gun to kill? Or was it just the drugs? Or just the hate?

None of them, nor a combination of them, are an excuse for the storm that mop-topped Dylann Roof unleashed on a quiet Bible study in an historic black church in Charleston. But blame and labels and painting with a broad brush won't move the needle of racial issues in America forward. In fact, they can only make things worse.

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