In response to deadly school shootings, Republicans have gone to extraordinary and creative lengths to identify possible explanations unrelated to easy access to firearms. GOP officials and prominent voices on the right have blamed video games. And absentee fathers. And the absence of government-imposed school prayer. And abortion. And the multitude of doors. And pornography. And “wokeness.” And “cultural decay.”
This week, following another deadly school shooting in Minnesota, the right has apparently decided to add antidepressants to the list.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, appeared on Fox News on Thursday morning and declared, “We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor] drugs, and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.”
Soon after, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed the point, emphasizing possible “links” between prescription antidepressants and youth violence.
The same afternoon, JD Vance stuck to the new script. NBC News reported on comments the vice president made a political event in Wisconsin:
‘We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America. We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence,’ Vance said at an event in Wisconsin in his first public remarks about Wednesday’s church shooting in neighboring Minnesota, in which two children were killed.
At this point, we could talk about the fact that the available scientific research does not support the proposition that psychiatric drugs contribute to school shootings. We could also talk about the fact that, if the Trump administration had genuine concerns about mental health and violence, it wouldn’t have cut student mental health grants, which were approved with bipartisan support and were intended to help prevent school shootings.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Republicans desperately hope to steer the public conversation away from possible restrictions on guns, so they meander from one foolish scapegoat to another. There’s a difference between bad arguments and unserious arguments, and if the political response to this week’s school shooting proves anything, it’s this: The problem is not just that Republicans’ claims are wrong, it’s that they’re not even trying to be right. In true post-policy form, the party is wholly indifferent to governing on the substance of the issue, since meaningful solutions might prove ideologically unsatisfying. The result is this dynamic in which GOP is peddling gibberish ideas in the hopes that some combination of time, distraction, legislative abuses and policy inertia will once again leave our gun laws unchanged. They might very well be right. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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