NRA’s Oliver North Links Rx, School Shootings
VIDEO: Oliver North, the National Rifle Association’s incoming president, linked ADHD medication to the recent school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. Source: CNN
(Jacqueline Howard, CNN) Oliver North, the National Rifle Association’s incoming president, has suggested that a certain medication to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, could be partially responsible for the recent gun violence in American schools: Ritalin.
“The problem that we’ve got is, we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease, and the disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment; the disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence,” North said Sunday in an interview with Fox News Sunday.
“They’ve been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male, and they’re young teenagers in most cases, and they’ve come through a culture where violence is commonplace,” he said.
“Many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten. Now, I am certainly not a doctor, I’m a Marine, but I can see those kinds of things happening.”
The comments from North came on the heels of a shooting last week at Santa Fe High School in Texas, where eight students and two teachers were killed.
A suspect, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was taken into custody. This year alone in the United States, there have been 22 school shootings in which someone was hurt or killed, which averages to more than one shooting a week.
Among those was the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, this year.
The shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, had a history of ADHD. His psychiatric records obtained by CNN showed that in 2016, he was on two types of medication that are routinely prescribed for ADHD, but neither was Ritalin. Read the full story at CNN.
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