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In the aftermath of deadly mass shootings in May, Republicans and their allies scrambled to deflect attention away from guns. Prominent voices on the right ended up trying to blame, among other things, the multitude of doors at schools, abortion, video games, “secularization,” absentee fathers, and the virtues of government-imposed school prayer.
Some of these clearly can’t be applied to the mass shooting in Highland Park — there are no doors to a July Fourth parade, for example, taking away one of Sen. Ted Cruz’s favorite talking points — but as The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman noted, the right is still getting creative.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed the massacre on medication given to young people, bleak economic prospects, and women nagging young men.... Carlson’s colleague Laura Ingraham homed in on the real culprit: marijuana. “What can regular pot use trigger in young men in particular? Psychosis and other violent personality changes,” she said, blaming the media for “covering up the truth about the growing scourge of violent psychosis in our young people” created by weed.
Conservative media personality Mark Levin apparently preferred a broader and more traditional approach, blaming “cultural decay, the decay of the civil society, the war on cops, the way that human life is viewed, whether it’s abortion, infanticide, whatever the issue.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell added, “The core of the problem is not the Second Amendment.”
It’s tiresome for a reason: We keep experiencing the same debate, as if we were watching a dispute unfold in “Groundhog Day.” The right keeps looking for ways to avoid blaming the preponderance of guns, while the left keeps explaining that blaming conservatives’ culprits doesn’t make sense.
There are countries around the world where there’s access to marijuana, abortion, and video games, just as there are plenty of young people across the globe on anti-depressants. None of these countries is forced to deal with routine mass shootings — not because they have better societies or better people, but because those countries are not awash in deadly firearms.
Waldman added:
There won’t ever be a single factor that explains the psychology of every mass shooter. Some grew up in poverty while others didn’t. Some have diagnosable mental illnesses while others don’t. Some are motivated by a specific ideology of hate while others are driven by nebulous rage at the world. But there’s one thing every last one of them has in common, without exception, and it isn’t pot smoking or being nagged by women. It’s that they were able, with little difficulty, to get their hands on a weapon that they could use to kill as many people as they wished.
Those looking for “the core of the problem” should start here.