Gun-rights advocates shift blame for shootings from weapons to mental illness

Evidence

The root cause of gun violence, he claimed, resides in mental illness. Senator Schumer of New York likened LaPierre’s displaced causal attribution to analyzing the causes of lung cancer without talking about cigarettes. In the TV appearance, LaPierre characterized the news media as “an anti–Second Amendment industry in [Washington, D.C.]” (Hersh, 2012). LaPierre’s proposed remedy for school shootings was to place armed security guards and armed volunteers in every school in the nation. Teachers could be armed as well. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1252

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral disengagement mechanisms Bandura catalogs throughout this book - euphemistic labeling and displacement of responsibility as ways to neutralize harm.
• DEFINE: Schumer’s lung-cancer analogy crisply illustrates the ‘displaced causal attribution’ mechanism in action.