Fox's focus on mental health after mass shootings is a cynical dodge

Fox News host Tucker Carlson put his finger on what he claimed was the problem after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. “There is what they call a mental health crisis in progress,” he said on his show that night. “What's causing it? What can we do?”

Carlson never really got around to answering his questions, but he did point his viewers toward a villain: Democrats who propose tightening gun restrictions. “They don't seem that interested in the fact that there are an awful lot of tragically, sometimes dangerously mentally ill people wandering around all of a sudden, like, what is that?” he asked. 

Carlson isn’t alone — his colleagues have used the same mental health talking point as they follow the playbook that Fox hosts pull out after every mass shooting. They want to move the conversation away from popular Democratic proposals to limit access to guns, and so they say that Democrats are ignoring the real problem of mental health. But once that work is done, and the prospect of political action squelched once again, they quickly lose interest in actually taking steps to improve access to mental health care — until news of another mass shooting breaks.