From Columbine perhaps to Blacksburg, we have witnessed carnage by people on psychotropic drugs.

Yet we hear no demands for probes into prescribed antidepressants.

Instead, we hear cries for gun control.

By this thinking, we should have eliminated airliners after the 9/11 attacks. After all, airliners kill people.

If gun control works in a school, city, state or nation, it should work in the world. If so, we should disarm and disband our military.

America could become a 100 percent gun-free zone. Thus would gun control bring school and world peace.

Sure.

Gun control is about controlling the populace, but let's set that aside. Let's talk about another method of control, about drugs and about the government/industry/media cartel that pushes them.

Consider:

April 1999: Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, fulfill their delusions in a high school in Columbine, Colo. Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox. Klebold's autopsy was never released. The toll: 13 murdered, 23 wounded, Harris and Klebold dead from suicide.

May 1999: T.J. Solomon, 15, shoots up his high school in Conyers, Ga. He was on a mix of antidepressants. The toll: six wounded.

March 2001: Jason Hoffman, 18, attacks his high school in El Cajon, Calif. Hoffman was on the antidepressants Effexor and Celexa. The toll: five wounded.

March 2005: Jeff Weise, 16, goes berserk on Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. He was on Prozac. The toll: nine murdered, five wounded, Weise dead from suicide.

The list of killers on prescribed antidepressants could continue to the bottom of this page and beyond. Prescribed psychotropic drugs played a role in virtually every school massacre of the last 10 years. They appear as well in the most horrible of killings, such as mothers drowning their children or chopping off their arms.

The more widely they are prescribed, the more massacres we get.

Here is how it often starts.

Government employees from kindergarten to college identify a problem kid. They force a mental evaluation. They feed the patient mind-altering drugs. Everybody is happier: government, parents, kid and drug companies.

That's roughly how it went with the psychopath in Virginia. He was forced into a mental evaluation, with counselors. We don't yet know whether they gave him drugs, but that's the routine.

After treatment, he kills 32 people and himself.

Then what happens? They call in more counselors, grief counselors for the whole school.

They hold a multicultural memorial love-in and pep rally. They light candles, listen to tunes, recite poetry and chant slogans. Give peace a chance. Love will overcome. It's a '60s flashback, Woodstock all over again. Let's fire up the bong.

Three years ago the Food and Drug Administration put warning labels on antidepressants. Studies showed they made children nearly twice as likely to become suicidal. They can increase hostility. They can contribute to exactly the behavior shown by school killers.

Two days after the Virginia massacre, another government study said antidepressants do more good than harm.

Maybe you saw this on television, which gets massive revenue from drug advertisers. Maybe this explains why no critical questions were asked.

Can anybody produce a study not done by people getting drug industry and government money, and not covered by compromised media?

Antidepressant drugs may benefit some people, but we are ignorant of whom they hurt. One price for that ignorance is school massacres. Gun-free zones and candlelight ceremonies will not cure ignorance.

We need to reconsider an '80s slogan: Just say no.

We find out what is happening with these drugs.

Meanwhile, we prepare for the next crackhead, meth freak or patient of our government/pharmaceutical establishment.

We all report to the firing range to stop the bastard.

Phil Lucas is executive editor of The News Herald in Panama City, Fla. Contact him at [email protected]. To find out more about Lucas and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.