The NRA has been the sole target of the vitriolic anti-gun left ever since the Parkland shooting, in which an already far-left-leaning community, headed by newly minted teenage activist, turned their anger on the time-honored Second Amendment organization.
Oliver North, the incoming president of the NRA, spoke with Fox News Sunday over the weekend in the wake of the more recent Santa Fe shooting in Texas, in which a 17-year-old gunman, armed with a shotgun and a revolver, killed 10 on Friday.
But North, who is soon set to head up an organization that so often finds itself defending the Second Amendment in the wake of tragic murders committed by angry young men with chilling motives, says that by focusing on the guns rather than the gunmen, we are failing to treat the real cause of school shootings.
“The problem that we’ve got is we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease,” he told Fox News, as reported by The Washington Times. “And the disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.”
He pointed not only to the pervasive violence in pop culture and media, but also the ongoing trend of boys and young men being prescribed and given pharmaceutical medication, oftentimes for the majority of their school years.
“Nearly all of these perpetrators are male, and they’re young teenagers in most cases, and they’ve come through a culture where violence is commonplace,” he said. “All we need to do is turn on a TV, go to a movie. If you look at what has happened to the young people, many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten. Now, I am certainly not a doctor; I’m a Marine. But I can see those kinds of things happening.”
There are more short-term solutions that schools can put in place as well, he noted, such as NRA’s School Shield program, which would allow certain staff members to carry firearms and provide training on how to respond to school shootings.
