House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wisconsin) returned to familiar territory Thursday morning following the mass shooting in San Bernardino: Mental illness is at the core of the problem.
“What we have seen—and a common theme among many of these mass shootings—is a theme of mental illness,” Ryan told CBS This Morning early Thursday. “And we need to fix our mental illness laws, our policies. They’re outdated. And that is something that we are working on right now.”
According to CBS News, the “legislation introduced by Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pennsylvania, that would revamp the country’s mental health systems. Among other steps, the measure would create an assistant secretary position in the Department of Health and Human Services to address mental illness and fix a shortage of beds in psychiatric hospitals.”
Ryan said much the same thing following the Nov. 27 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Reuters news agency quoted Ryan as telling a Dec. 1 news briefing: “The common theme with these kinds of shootings is mental illness. This is not something we should be ignoring. We need to overhaul our mental health system.”
Ryan also pushed back against renewed calls by President Barack Obama for tighter restrictions on gun sales in the United States.
“On this particular issue, we do have a Constitution,” the House Speaker told CBS. “Citizens have a due process right. And anyone can just be arbitrarily placed upon the no-fly list. In fact, that’s happened quite a bit. … We can’t have some government official just arbitrarily put them on a list … we want to make sure that we don’t violate a person’s rights.”
