Another mass shooting. This time through the stained glass window of a church attached to a grammar school in Minnesota. Children dead and wounded, families and a community in trauma, horrifying grief. And once again, America reaches for its favorite placebo: thoughts and prayers. Politicians lower their voices, bow their heads, and hope the echo of ritualistic sympathy drowns out the gunfire still ringing in our ears.
But prayers don’t stop bullets.
Condolences don’t cauterize wounds.
Partisan finger-pointing doesn’t save children.
We live in a nation with more guns than people, an arsenal unmatched anywhere in the so-called civilized world. And the results are exactly what you would expect. Mass shootings are not some tragic mystery; they are the predictable consequence of flooding a society with weapons.
And yet, instead of facing this truth, we are fed excuses from every direction. On the Republican right, the party of “law and order,” the reflex is always the same: more guns. More armed guards, more militarized schools and churches, more fantasy that the only way to feel safe is to live in a permanent combat zone. This is not freedom. It is surrender to fear.
And in Donald Trump’s administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has found his own scapegoat: antidepressants. He has pledged to study whether SSRIs cause violence, as though the real culprit in America’s massacres is Prozac, not pistols. This is not only absurd, it is cruel.
Blaming SSRIs means blaming those people with depression and anxiety. It tells the already stigmatized, “Your illness is not just yours to bear, it is the root of horror in our society.” It paints millions of struggling Americans as potential killers, as twisted and dangerous. It alienates them. It persecutes them. It is an act of political cowardice prettied up as science.
Meanwhile, Democrats fall back on platitudes. They offer outrage, vigils, hashtags, and promises that never quite harden into legislation. They talk about “common sense gun laws” as though the gun lobby hasn’t already purchased the silence of half the chamber and paralyzed the rest. They campaign on courage and then govern on caution.
The truth is not that complicated. Other nations have antidepressants. Other nations have poverty, broken families, disaffected youth, and political division. But they do not have more guns than people. They do not arm every grievance with a trigger. That is why they do not bury their citizens, week after week, under the headline of “mass shooting.”
Until we reckon with the weapons themselves- the sheer volume, the easy access, the grotesque worship of them- every other theory, every other study, every other excuse is smoke in the air. Thoughts and prayers are cowardice. More guns are madness. Scapegoating mental health is cruelty. Empty promises are complicity.
Until we confront the weapons, America will continue its ritual: blood on the floor, children’s bodies maimed and killed, and excuses in the air.