In the wake of a gunman’s rampage through Lewiston, Maine, that has left at least 18 people dead according to the The Associated Press, Ron DeSantis isn’t blaming unfettered access to guns, and is instead assigning culpability to a lack of psychological help for the murderer.
“While the facts are still coming in, this could be another example of a failure of our nation’s mental health system,” DeSantis posted to social media.
The U.S. Army Reservist who authorities say shot up a bowling alley before heading to a nearby bar to shoot at more people reportedly displayed evidence of mental issues during reserve training this summer. He was taken to the Keller Army Community Hospital at West Point for observation.
For DeSantis, who signed a permitless carry law just this year in Florida, the muted response is just the latest in a series of reactions to mass murders where he offered little commentary on the weapons themselves.
Confronted in Jacksonville after a racist murder took three lives at a Dollar General in New Town, he said it was “outrageous” to blame him for the killing of three Black people by a White gunman with swastikas drawn on his AR-15.
During a friendly interview on Fox News, the Governor groused about critics who would “leverage that as a political cudgel to use against somebody that you disagree with politically.”
In 2022, as reported by the Florida Phoenix at the time, DeSantis addressed mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Parkland and Columbine.
He blamed “deranged psychopaths” for the school shooting at Columbine in 1999.
Regarding the White supremacist who killed 10 people in Buffalo, he deflected blame not to guns or the killer’s rancid ideology, but to victims not having guns to fire back. He said mass murderers “do look for areas where they think they’re going be able to get away with it.”
“The Buffalo shooter, for example, said ‘you know I’m going places where I don’t have to worry about people, conceal carry, or anything like that,’” DeSantis said, “because he wants — they wanted basically sitting ducks.”
Speaking about the Parkland shooting, DeSantis did not say the problem was killer having access to guns, instead saying “the shooter didn’t meet the quick resistance that he should have met” that fateful day in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Per the Tampa Bay Times, he offered similar explanations for other mass murders, blaming ideology and eschewing comment on the availability of weapons.
“You have the guy in El Paso, which obviously that was like an ethno-nationalist motivation. Obviously, the Pulse nightclub (mass shooting in Orlando in 2017) was militant Islam. And then you have some people who are just crazy, there’s not necessarily a clear motivation,” DeSantis said. “I think you have to be familiar with all of those types of threats and have the warning signs identified and then do something about it.”
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