Minnesota Republicans emphasize mental health over gun restrictions in response to shootings

Minnesota Republicans want to make mental health the focus of the state’s response to high-profile violence in recent months, setting up a conflict with Democrats who say gun restrictions must be part of the solution.

This comes in response to Gov. Tim Walz’s vow to call lawmakers back to the Capitol after the shooting deaths of state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home in June and two children at a Minneapolis Catholic church and school in August.

“We could spend weeks upon weeks just on the mental health portion,” Sen. Rich Draheim, R-Madison Lake, said during an informal Senate working group hearing Wednesday to discuss gun violence prevention measures.

“What can we do to hopefully get people the help so they aren’t, what I would refer to as disturbed, so they don’t shoot through windows at children?“

The conflicting approaches from the two parties follow well-worn paths in the long debate over legislative solutions to mass shootings. And it’s not clear that Walz can bring the sides together as he makes a gun control pitch central to his latest re-election effort. With the governor and all 201 legislators on the ballot next year, the state’s response is likely to figure in both parties’ campaign messages.

House Republicans have rolled out a plan that includes more school security funding, school resource officers and funding for mental health treatment beds.

They have offered few details, and it’s unclear how much the proposals might cost. GOP House Speaker Lisa Demuth suggested last week that one possible source of funding could be the remaining $108 million in a fund originally meant for a passenger rail line to Duluth.

“You can’t address reducing gun violence without addressing the guns themselves, but even on our side of the aisle there’s a recognition that it’s more complex than that alone,” said Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, who leads the Senate’s working group.

“The GOP has been consistent in indicating that it’s about the people and not the guns.”

Republicans have long resisted calls for gun control and in the wake of mass shootings instead focused on inadequate mental health care.

Advocates for people living with mental illness say they are grateful for legislators’ pledges for support, but they are leery of statements that link mental illness and violence.

“Every time there’s a mass shooting, my stomach drops, my heart stops,” said Sue Abderholden, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Minnesota. “Because I just know the focus is going to turn to mental illness.”

Still, Swanson said, the perceived connection between mental health and violence, however tenuous, seems to resonate.

“In my view, it’s kind of a dodge to not talk about firearms,” he said in an interview.

Swanson pointed to red flag laws, which Minnesota recently adopted, as a relatively new and promising way to limit violence. They allow law enforcement and others to ask a court to temporarily stop someone at risk of harming themselves or others from possessing or buying a firearm.

While some states have passed red flag laws with bipartisan support, Minnesota passed its version in 2023 with only Democratic votes.

Research on their effectiveness is limited and inconclusive. Swanson’s work. however, suggests they help prevent suicides and, in conjunction with other policies like comprehensive background checks, he said he believes they can help prevent other violence, too.

Besides asking for investments in mental health, NAMI Minnesota is pressing legislators to strengthen the state’s red flag law and a handful of other gun control measures.

So far, Democrats are pushing most vocally for bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. But Latz has also floated a bill that would fund a public awareness campaign for the state’s red flag law, he said, “to make sure as many people as possible know that this is available.”

It’s unclear if that will garner any Republican votes. But there is some consensus forming on the mental health side.

Rep. Joe Schomacker, R-Luverne, and Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis, who co-chair the House Human Services Finance and Policy, said they’ve agreed to support at least three proposals intended to strengthen Minnesota’s mental health care system.

“In human services, it’s a lot less political and a lot less politically charged,” Schomacker told the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Noor said discussions are continuing about other possible areas of agreement, too, such as adding more mental health treatment beds.

“This is not a one and done deal,” he said. “There’s no easy answer, but we have to find common ground so that we can move forward.”

Meanwhile, three dozen Republicans have called on the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to conduct an expanded toxicology analysis of the shooter in the Annunciation Catholic Church and School attack in Minneapolis. The analysis would include testing for antidepressants and drugs associated with gender transition therapies.

“Knowing the complete picture of what substances, legal and illegal, may have played a role in the perpetrator’s mental state would go a long way to understanding the factors that influenced the perpetrator’s motivations in committing this horrific act,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter.

The letter echoes the suggestion of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that psychiatric drugs may have played a role in the shooting.