Steve King: Don't blame guns. Blame Ritalin, video games, family break-up and policies.

SIOUX CENTER, Ia. — During an event with supporters and detractors Thursday night, U.S. Rep. Steve King said people shouldn't blame guns for gun violence.

"It isn’t the gun. There’s a whole series of things that are part of it," said the Republican Iowa 4th District representative.

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King made his comments at a "politics and pizza" event equally populated by local conservatives and King opponents who gathered to see the congressman, inspired in part what the controversial candidate's campaign said about Parkland student Emma Gonzalez.

He said culture changes, lack of prayer in schools, gun-free zones, family break-ups, Ritalin and video games play more of a role in gun violence than does access to guns.

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Culture and policy

"This is in our culture now," he said, citing killings in schools between 1924 and 1966.

King connected the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas, in which a student killed 13 people and wounded many others, to policies of the era.

"That was three years after they took prayer out of our public schools then you say a few more, a smaller number, but still (some) mass shootings scattered between 1966 and 1989," he said. "And then in 1990 they passed the legislation that turned our schools into gun-free zones. Gun-free zones and then we saw mass killings in our schools at a rate of about one every year and a half."

Beyond policy changes, King also claimed that "what’s happened to our families" has played a role in recent mass shootings.

"Our families are breaking up," he said.

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'Big Pharma'

"We are medicating our children with Ritalin from kindergarten on up and other medication that’s there. When they’re going on that medication, they’re more dangerous than before when they started. When they get their medication stabilized, it’s OK in many cases, when it’s balanced these pharmaceuticals are good but when they stop taking them, when they’re going off of those drugs they’re more dangerous than they were before they started to take them," he said.

King alleged "Big Pharma" pays families to keep quiet, but he's heard through back-channels about the role prescribed drugs may play in shootings.

In conclusion, King said there are many non-gun policy reasons that mass shootings are on the rise.

"Families are breaking up, prayer’s out of the public school, we have kids that are playing the video games day and night they kill — all day and all night without consequence because they live again even when they’re killed in the video," he said. "Put this all together I want to study every one of these killers and I want to understand what the common denominators are, what we can do to reduce or eliminate (them)."