Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson made an appearance on Fox News and addressed what he believes is to blame for the school shooting that left 21 dead in Uvalde, Texas.
He pointed to violent lyrics in rap music, video games, and the internet as playing a role in mass school shootings.
“Kids are exposed to all kinds of horrible stuff nowadays too,” he told Fox News. “I look back and I think about the horrible stuff that they hear when they listen to rap music, the video games that they watch from a really early age with all of this horrible violence and stuff, and I just think that they have this access to the internet on a regular basis, which is just not good for kids.”
Jackson, who is a “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment, believes that the conversation surrounding gun laws is misplaced. Instead, he believes that the way in which children are being raised is to blame and that reintegrating “family and community and church” into our culture is essential. He also pointed to morals having shifted over the past decades. “Our culture has changed over the last 30 or 40 years, and there’s been an attack on those things in particular,” he added, pointing to the morals of his youth.
Jackson also said he was ready to work alongside Democrats to offer mental health services and teach children the “right things” in order to avoid school shootings.
Most Democrats and supporters of gun control disagree with his stance. In his first address after the Robb Elementary shooting, President Joe Biden pointed out that shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world.
“They have mental health problems (and) domestic disputes in other countries, they have people who are lost, but these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency that they happen in America,” he said, according to ABC News.
In fact, mass shootings in the United States account for 73% of shootings in “developed countries” between 1998 and 2019, according to the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. The United States was also found to be the only country to have a mass shooting every year.
Democrats have put forward the Protect Our Kids Package, a series of eight bills with the aim of reducing gun violence. Among those bills are legislation that would enable law enforcement to confiscate weapons from individuals deemed a threat to themselves or others, as well as an assault weapons ban and two bills that would strengthen background checks for guns.