YES: We must confront the cultural mess that gave us Uvalde.

Children should not be forced to undergo regular drills to prepare them for the threat of a shooter. Parents should not be worried about whether those drills will someday be necessary. And the public as a whole should not be accustomed to reading headlines about the latest mass killing. Yet here we are, reading about the 27th school shooting this year.

We have a problem in this country — that’s just a fact. But it’s a problem much more complicated than many would like to admit. The solution is not simply to restrict access to firearms, as gun control advocates like to claim. And I say this as someone who is much more of a squish on gun policies than many of my fellow conservatives. I think it’s ridiculous, for example, that the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter was able to own a gun legally when he was not considered legally responsible or mature enough to buy a beer. And I think certain restrictions, such as narrow and well-defined red flag laws that would allow law enforcement to block a person’s access to firearms if a family member or close friend is able to prove he is mentally unfit to carry one, are a good idea.

But there is no evidence that the sweeping gun control policies pushed by leftists, such as an outright ban on assault-style weapons, would have done anything to prevent the mass shootings that have taken place. Such policies aren’t even good at preventing common crime. In Chicago, for example, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, and where law enforcement regularly seizes thousands of illegal weapons per year, crime is so rampant that Mayor Lori Lightfoot had to enact a curfew prohibiting minors from being outside after 10 p.m.

Moreover, gun control policies, even if they could be effective, would be little more than a Band-Aid solution. People don’t shoot each other just because there are guns around. The Uvalde shooter wanted to shoot up a classroom full of children — that’s the real problem.

This, ultimately, is the heart of the debate. Why are so many young men being driven to commit such heinous acts of violence? Why do they always seem to have no one in their lives paying attention to the signs of mental instability and aggression? What is wrong with our systems that they keep failing to identify and help people who are desperately in need of an intervention?

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