COMMENTARY: Too many guns is not the country’s biggest problem

The liberal media and Democrats reacted in their usual knee-jerk way to last month’s shootings at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

They didn’t pin the blame on the monster who took the lives of two schoolchildren and wounded 18 others, including 14 kids, as they attended a Mass on the first day of classes.

They didn’t blame the shooting on the killer’s mental health, extreme anger at the world or his antisemitism and love of Hitler and Timothy McVeigh.

They didn’t dare say that the shooting of innocents could have had something to do with the killer reportedly regretting his transition at age 17 from a male to a woman in 2019.

And you can be sure no one on the left ever considered the possibility the actions of a deeply depressed, confused and hate-filled young man might be the result of being on dangerous antidepressants such as Zoloft or stimulants such as Ritalin.

He may or may not have been on psychiatric drugs, but it is true that more than 20 mass shooters in our recent past were reportedly taking them when they went off on their killing sprees. But liberals say the idea drugs have had anything to do with previous mass shootings by young men is so crazy only Republicans and nuts such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could believe it.

U.S. Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota is especially deranged about guns and mass shootings. She said RFK Jr. should be fired just for saying the powerful drugs given to treat children with gender dysphoria could be partly to blame for some school shootings and the idea deserves to be studied.

Smith is a Democrat, obviously. That means she and her soulmates in Congress and the media already know the exact cause of every school shooting long before they happen. It’s always the same thing — guns, guns, guns.

They continually chant there are too many of them in the United States — maybe as many as 500 million guns (fewer than .00004 of which are used each year to kill someone.) And they say the reason it is so easy for evil or insane mass killers to get their hands on high-powered firearms is because gun control laws are kept so weak by Republicans.

Smith and other Democrats claim conservatives focus on non-gun causes such as mental health and antidepressants to distract from doing something to solve the problem of too many guns. But do they and the liberal gun-hating media know that the percentage of households with guns was much higher in 1950 than it is today?

Of course not.

When Harry Truman was president, there was at least one gun in about 50 percent of all American homes, according to a 1959 Gallup poll. Today, despite all the anti-gun propaganda you hear, that number has dropped to one gun in 37 percent of homes.

Sure, there are more than twice as many Americans today and hundreds of millions more guns. But even personal gun ownership has fallen to about 32 percent, according to Pew.

None of these interesting gun-ownership facts matters to liberals. Guns are inherently evil. Period. They believe, as a matter of faith, that guns automatically create crime and murder, not the people who misuse them.

But if too many guns cause mass school shootings, why didn’t they occur 75 years ago, when more American households had guns? Since the 1950s and 1960s our society, our culture and our politics have changed in too many good and bad ways to count or do anything about. But I think one important problem we have today is how we treat our kids. Too many parents won’t face up to the fact that their kids are mentally ill.

Instead of therapy, though, they give their kids permission to be angry at the world. Parents need to be there for their kids 24/7 to help them deal with their mental problems and grow up securely and safely.

They shouldn’t be giving permission to their kids to be dangerously angry at the world all the time. And obviously they should protect them from the left-wing media — and not let them anywhere near a gun.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on X.