(Daily Caller) Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson said Tuesday that mental health and drug crises among young men lead to acts of violence, such as mass shootings.
Carlson said the suspected shooter of the Fourth of July parade, Robert Crimo, fit the category of the majority of those who commit mass shootings—young, male and crazy. Lake County Sheriff deputy chief Christopher Covelli said policeencountered Crimo on two separate occasions in 2019, once where the suspected shooter threatened to “kill everyone” and confiscated a total of 16 knives.
“Look at Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo. Would you sell a gun to that guy, does he seem like a nut case? Of course he does,” Carlson said. “So, why didn’t anyone raise an alarm? Well, maybe because he didn’t stand out. Maybe because there’s a lot of young men in America who suddenly look and act a lot like this guy. It’s not an attack, it’s just true. Like Crimo, they inhabited a solitary fantasy world of social media, porn and video games. They’re high on government endorsed weed.”
The host said young men face the crisis of being angry over the realization that their lives will not improve from their parents and from being lectured about their “male privilege,” which Carlson said leads to an unhappy and unhealthy life.
Carlson pointed to the increase of drug prescriptions and mass shootings rising simultaneously.
An increase in the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) and antidepressant drugs has contributed to the rising number of mass shooters, including one of the two Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, who took Zoloft and Luvox drugs in 1999, he said. A shooter named Kipp Kinkle used Prozac when he shot his parents and opened fire in an Oregon high school, while another teenager who killed his grandfather and 10 classmates used the same drug.
He cited data from the National Library of Medicine finding that the total number of prescriptions of SSRI usage rose by 3,001% between 1991 and 2018 and by 40% among teens between 2015-19. Antidepressant usage jumped by nearly 400% between 1988-1994 and 2005-2008, according to Harvard Health Publishing. The suicide rate and the number of mass shootings rose drastically within that time frame.
“The point of this change was to make Americans calmer, saner [and] happier. Take these drugs and your problems will go away. Yes, you’ll become numb, you will lose part of yourself, you’ll no longer experience great joy, you’ll become part robot,” he said. “But at least you won’t want to kill yourself or harm other people. That was the problem.”
