Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. comes from Democratic royalty, but he's running as an independent. Then again, he's got some views that are so far out from the mainstream that Democrats wouldn't touch him with a 10-foot pole.

Yet some of his views show that he hasn't completely broken away from his family roots. After all, he admits that an assault weapon ban won't do much, but would still sign an assault weapon ban into law.

So yeah, he's far from an ideal alternative.

I mean, he picked a vice presidential candidate that no one had ever heard of.

Then again, she's at least capable of talking sense.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vice presidential nominee, Nicole Shanahan, affirmed her support for the Second Amendment as the Biden-Harris campaign continues to push for tougher gun control policies. 

During a long-form podcast with YouTuber Ian Carroll, Shanahan said, “The Second Amendment is really important to preserve. And if the issue is gun shootings and mass shootings, which is a real issue, we need to get to the root of the issue.”

“Taking away liberties while obfuscating the issue around mental health is not going to lead us to a better tomorrow,” Shanahan continued. “Maybe that makes me less liberal, but I actually think it makes me quite actually progressive in my thinking that we can’t strip people of their liberties — ever.” 

That sounds like, well, me in a lot of ways. I've long been in favor of getting to the root of the problem rather than trying to attack something that's peripheral to the issue, which is all gun control does. The issue is that people want to kill others in job lots and don't really care about surviving the encounter.

That's a huge issue and taking away guns won't make that problem go away. After all, it's not like Oklahoma City was a mass shooting, yet it killed 168 people--that's more than any two mass shootings in this country's modern history.

So Shanahan is talking sense, which isn't really what I expected. Then again, Shanahan was named as a complete unknown, someone who had fundraised for RFK but really had no other political credentials anyone could find.

It's just a shame that as an independent candidate, these comments will disappear into the ether. They won't get picked up by any major news organization and publicized like they would if Kamala Harris said something, despite the fact that there's clearly more intelligence behind these comments than anything the vice president might say.

But maybe, just maybe, this idea that we should target the underlying issues is starting to catch on. Maybe we can start looking at why people become so filled with rage that they want to kill everyone and everything that crosses their path.

If we can reach that point as a society, we might actually start to do something.

Unfortunately, there are far too many people who genuinely believe that the problem is guns, that bombings, arson, stabbings, and other tools of mass murder are somehow more tolerable than someone misusing a tool that is used far more often to protect life than to take it.