According to the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Strategic and International Studies—two institutions not exactly known for their hysterics or partisan whimsy, the overwhelming majority of politically motivated mass shootings in the United States are traceable to right-wing and white supremacist ideologies. In 2022, the ADL reported an especially inconvenient statistic for the gun-lobby apologists: 100 percent of extremist-related mass shooting murders were committed by individuals with documented right-wing ties. Not “most.” Not “many.” All.
And yet, with a predictability bordering on ritual incantation, Republicans respond not by grappling with this evidence but by chanting the familiar absolution: mental health. It is their get-out-of-analysis-free card, invoked whenever blood stains the floor but never when budgets are drafted or votes are cast.
This selective concern would be merely dishonest if it were not so lethally hypocritical. For the same political movement that insists, often within hours of the carnage that America’s mass shootings are a mental health crisis has spent decades methodically dismantling the very mental health infrastructure that might plausibly mitigate such violence. The patron saint of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan, presided over the decisive turn. As governor of California and later as president, Reagan slashed federal involvement in mental health care, accelerating “deinstitutionalization” without providing the promised community-based alternatives. Patients were released; support systems were not built. The result was not compassion but abandonment.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed a landmark bill intended to fund a national network of community mental health centers, an attempt, however imperfect, to replace the old asylum model with accessible care. One year later, Reagan’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act gutted the program before it could take root. The message was unmistakable: mental illness would henceforth be treated not as a public responsibility, but as a private inconvenience.
The pattern never changed. Republican-backed policies have repeatedly reduced insurance coverage, funding, and access to mental health services, especially for the poor and working class. Medicaid, the single largest payer of behavioral health services in the country, has been a favorite target. Current Republican proposals, many branded under Trump’s revived agenda, would cut federal Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions, approaching a trillion dollars over a decade stripping tens of millions of Americans of coverage, including mental health treatment.
Simultaneously, targeted programs are quietly strangled. School-based mental health grants. Community violence intervention initiatives. Crisis and trauma services. Agencies such as SAMHSA and HRSA face restructuring and cuts totaling roughly $1 billion, money that once supported suicide prevention, addiction treatment, community clinics, and mental health professionals in underserved areas. Even surveys show that Republicans suffering from depression report strikingly high rates of unmet mental health needs. In other words, these policies harm their own constituents as surely as they endanger everyone else.
So we are left with a grimly logical conclusion. Either Republicans do not believe their own claim that mass shootings are a mental health problem or they do believe it, and are actively making the problem worse. There is no third option consistent with reason.
The hypocrisy becomes even more glaring when the conversation shifts abroad. J.D. Vance, responding to a recent mass shooting in Australia, blamed “radical ideology.” Not mental health. Not cultural decay. Not lone wolves. Ideology. He did not mention firearms—though Australia’s strict gun laws are the single most obvious reason it has not experienced a comparable massacre in decades. Nor did he note that Australia did not gut its mental health system after its last major shooting. Australia learned. America did not.
Australia restricted access to weapons. It sustained mental health funding. And for nearly 30 years, it avoided the recurring nightmare that Americans now accept as routine. The United States, by contrast, floods its population with firearms, slashes mental health care, and aggressively mainstreames extremist ideologies, particularly those wrapped in the pious costume of Christian nationalism.
And let us dispense with euphemism. The vast majority of mass shootings in America are committed by white men steeped in radical right-wing ideology. The theological differences between Christian nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism may be significant to seminaries, but they are trivial to the victims. Both are absolutist, apocalyptic, grievance-driven belief systems that sanctify violence and erase moral restraint. They are not merely political positions; they are pathologies, encouraged, excused, and weaponized by the modern right.
Thus the American formula for perpetual slaughter is complete: an endless supply of guns, a shredded mental health system, and a political culture that coddles extremism while pretending to mourn its consequences. Republicans insist that more weapons will stop shootings, that shootings are caused by mental illness, and that ideology only matters when it is foreign. Every one of these claims collapses under the weight of evidence.
Australia understood this thirty years ago. America, trapped in the delusions of its right-wing mythology, refuses to learn. And every refusal is paid for in blood. Thoughts and prayers everyone!
Why It Matters
This isn’t a debate about rhetoric, it’s about life and death. Right-wing leaders invoke “mental health” as a deflection strategy, not a solution, while actively gutting the very systems they claim would prevent violence. At the same time, they fuel extremist ideology, protect unlimited gun access, and then pretend their hands are clean.
Key Takeaways
• Most extremist mass shootings in the U.S. are committed by right-wing radicals
• The GOP invokes “mental health” only as a shield against accountability
• Republicans systematically dismantled mental health infrastructure — starting with Reagan
• Medicaid cuts, program rollbacks, and community care reductions make treatment harder to access
• Hypocrisy exposed: blaming illness while encouraging extremism and refusing gun reform
• Other countries like Australia improved laws and reduced violence, the U.S. refuses to learn
Further Reading – Bookshop.org
- Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America – Adam Winkler
A powerful examination of gun mythology versus legal reality. https://civilheresy.com/gunfight - American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War – Tim Alberta
Deep investigation into how right-wing radicalization reshaped U.S. politics. https://civilheresy.com/american carnage - The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies – Susan Jacoby. A critical look at anti-intellectualism, propaganda, and the decay of truth in American life. https://civilheresy.com/the age of american unreason
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