Fox News’ resident psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow believes that President Barack Obama advocates “disempowering” people through gun safety legislation because he was “abandoned” as a child.

Ablow on Tuesday told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that the president had “hijacked” the slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut “in order to advance his desire for gun control.”

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“Controlling weapons isn’t going to stop mass killings,” he explained. “The common element in these murders is untreated or poorly treated mental illness. We’ve deconstructed the entire mental health care system. It is in shambles, and the president’s reticence to make that the issue that should be front and center is a defining moment that defines him as unwilling to do the right thing to fix what’s broken.”

“He’s accused of having one solution to every problem, and that’s more government,” Dobbs pointed out.

“Absolutely,” Ablow agreed. “His solution runs psychologically in the direction of disempowering the individual every single time.”

Dobbs wondered if Obama was “truly that Machiavellian, that driven by his own ideological purpose” that he would advocate for gun control instead of embracing the values of freedom and fixing the mental health system.

“I’m certain that’s true,” Ablow opined. “Number one, the autonomy of others did him no favors as a kid, when he was abandoned again and again by people who were — quote — unquote — responsible and supposed to do the right thing, like parents. So his belief, ‘You know what? What good is individual autonomy in decision making? What good did it do me? The collective is what needs to be empowered, and all the better if I’m the center of that collective and the most powerful person in it.'”

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Watch this video from Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight, broadcast Jan. 22, 2012

(h/t: Media Matters)