A small percent also shoot up malls and schools full of children. Just a small percent though so who cares about them?
Huh? I was responding to someone that said the anti-depressants were "
notorious" for doing such and such. To me the use of a word like that would suggest that a large percent of anti-depressant users were having these side effects. So I was pointing out that it was a small percent who actually do.
Marijuana effects brain chemistry and also can have side effects, but words like "notorious" were the type thrown around in the "reefer madness" days, and many people did believe that marijuana use was causing murder. The same type of attitude helped to get alcohol banned under prohibition.
Again, I'm not saying that alcohol and whatever else can't contribute in a big way, but what I am trying to point out is that for emotional events people always look for simplified black and white explanations, and this type of thinking can exaggerate the dangers of alcohol, etc.
Some other things that effect brain chemistry :
Soda linked to aggression in teens
Video Games Change Brain Chemistry: Study | NBC Chicago
This Is Your Brain On Violent Media
"He liked pizza too, maybe pizza was the influence!"
OK, pizza likely can't be a main influence, but we are talking about an ultra rare event. A rare amount of pizza might contain rotten ingredients and chemicals that may effect a small percent of the populations brain chemistry in an unknown way. Eating too much pizza can make people overweight, being overweight can make people angry, etc.
Some pizza has MSG, which mainstream medicine has declared to have potential side effects. If we look to "alternative" sources, then the fears of MSG are even greater, and yes, some of them think it can cause violence.
The percentage of the entire human populace that commits mass murder is a very minuscule percent as well so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
The less anything of this type happens, the less sure of an idea we can have about what causes it. The more people who do behavior A, but do not commit behavior B, the less sure we can be that A is a causation for B. If only 100 people played video games and all 100 of those people committed murder, this would be a super strong correlation that would suggest (but not prove) that A causes B. But when millions play video games and do not commit murder, this weakens the causation argument, though it does not disprove it.
Homicide and other violent crime rates continue to go way down, while at the same time things like video games and anti-depressants are more in use than ever before.
