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

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

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

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 will be able to bring the two 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 be fodder for 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 about those proposals, and it’s unclear how much they 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.

Democrats have said they’re open to exploring ideas beyond gun control to address mass shootings, but they insist mental health and security measures are not enough.

“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 is leading the 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 instead focused on inadequate mental health care in the wake of mass shootings. 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 Minnesota. “Because I just know the focus is going to turn to mental illness.”

Research shows that most people with serious mental illness are not violent, and a very small percentage of gun homicides are committed by people with serious mental illnesses, said Jeffrey Swanson, professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University.

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,” Swanson said in an interview.

Swanson pointed to so-called red flag laws, which Minnesota recently adopted, as a relatively new and promising method of limiting violence. They allow law enforcement and others to ask a court to temporarily stop someone at risk of harming themselves from possessing or purchasing a firearm. Some red flag laws in other states have received bipartisan support, though Minnesota’s passed in 2023 with only Democratic votes.

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

“The opportunity would be to scale this up by building awareness of it, by training law enforcement officers to use it,” he said.

In addition to asking for investments in mental health, NAMI Minnesota is also pushing legislators to strengthen the state’s own 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, “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, say they’ve agreed to support at least three proposals intended to strengthen the state’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.

Schomacker and Noor say they want to increase funding for behavioral health services in schools, do more to promote the 988 suicide hotline, and provide more state support for mobile crisis response centers that can move to where they are needed.

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,” Noor said. “There’s no easy answer, but we have to find common ground so that we can move forward.”

Three dozen Republicans are also calling for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to conduct an expanded toxicology analysis on the shooter in the Annunciation Catholic Church and School attack in Minneapolis, including 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,” they wrote in a letter.

The letter echoes the suggestion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the federal Department of Health and Human Services, that psychiatric drugs may have played a role in the Annunciation shooting.

Experts, however, say there’s no data to link antidepressants or a transgender identity to violence. Jillian Peterson, a professor at Hamline University who has helped build a database of the more than 200 U.S. mass shootings since 1966, said before Annunciation there was just one mass shooter who had a transgender identity.

“It’s 98 percent men,” she said. “If you really want to have an impact, you would target men, not transgender [people] or women. There’s nothing there.”

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