BuzzFeed – February 26, 2015
By Andrew Kaczynski & Megan Apper
Former Congressman Ron Paul, the father of potential presidential candidate Rand Paul, said Wednesday that “American Sniper” Chris Kyle would be alive today if his killer was not using psychotropic drugs.
Paul has repeatedly linked or blamed mass shootings on the use of psychotropic drugs.
“If Eddie Ray Routh had never served in the military, I’m of the opinion that he would probably not have killed anybody,” Paul wrote on the website of his Institute of Peace and Prosperity on Wednesday as well as on his Facebook page. “He would not be imprisoned for life and Chris Kyle would be alive today. Much of the blame should lie with our foreign policy of interventionism and the VA’s faulty reliance on psychotropic drugs for treating the guilt associated with preemptive wars.”
The post echoes comments Paul made last year in a speech to The Independent Institute in which he said “it doesn’t take a real genius” to figure out psychotropic drugs are the cause of mass shootings.
“Just recently we heard about another shooting at Fort Worth,” Paul said in his April 2014 speech. “Second time you know, within a short period of time and soldiers were killed and the articles kept saying, ‘well we got to get to the bottom of this, what is causing this?’ And yet it doesn’t take a real genius to figure it out. Because when you look at it, if you look at the shootings and the various problems on campuses, and who knows what will happen on the one that happened today, but almost always these massive shootings whether they are military or not, occur with the doctors involved giving psychotropic drugs to people who are depressed.”
Paul said when many veterans return from war they realize the dangers of multiple deployments and come to the belief that perhaps the war they are fighting in is “useless, worthless, maybe there is no benefit to it.”
“When individuals come back, of course they are torn, because they have realization — just as I was pleased that they have the realization that a non-interventialist foreign policy pleased the military — what would it be like to go over the 3,4,5 and 6 times, worrying where your next step is going to be and whether you are going to get blown up. Seeing your buddies killed, and not seeing back home a whole lot of concern about why we are there. Just ‘oh yes you are great guys, you are all a bunch of heroes’ and we all wear bumper stickers and everybody is happy about it. But that is a far cry from these people waking up and saying ‘you know, maybe this war is useless, worthless, maybe there is no benefit to it.’ And all of a sudden they remember about kids getting killed, women getting killed, and all the carnage and saying, ‘you know they never did a thing to me, why did I go 6,000 miles?’”
Paul then again singled out the use of psychotropic drugs, saying “now we have a suicide epidemic” and this was all a consequence of American foreign policy. The former congressman added the ultimate solution to the epidemic of soldiers committing suicide was a non-interventionist foreign policy.
“Now I am convinced that soldiers that are put up with that and when they are exposed to it, when they come back end up with a lot of guilt and so they go see a doctor and unfortunately the doctor gives them these drugs and they end up—and now we have a suicide epidemic. And its a consequence of the foreign policy. We are not going to stop this problem by turning it over to the doctors. We need to turn it over to the American people who insist that our government quit getting involved in these kind of wars and exposing our kids to these predicaments they are in.”