7 killed in Japan

There's a story today about a man driving a car into a crowd, getting out and stabbing people. In typical media fashion, intending to create the most fear possible, the article goes on to list all the stabbings that have occurred over the last few years in Japan.

This is typical media -- make things as scary as possible, make the threat to life and limb appear to be as widespread as possible and don't ever get close to trying to trace the problem or solve anything.

With even some slight intent to make things better, media could use the large set of data available to them to help identify patterns, to identify some underlying causes and perhaps improve something.

Obviously, that is a suggestion of a possible purpose for the media that is WAY off the line of current media actions; instead, they revel in making causes as obscure as possible so as to promote more fear and death.

Having said that, he's a prediction -- the man was on psych drugs. And so were a good number of the other stabbers listed by the article.

Here's a pattern they could observe if they had a couple of brain cells to rub together: a remarkably high percentage of the horribly violent criminals that do these kinds of things are on psych drugs that -- wait for it -- are consistently linked to this kind of violence.

Doesn't mean there aren't crazy people in the world who are in a pitiful state, just that they don't very often seem to take up arms to kill multiple innocents without being on psych drugs that drive them to it.

As the data rolls out about this story, we'll see if the psych drug record of the perpetrator is released.