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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and conservative columnist George Will told a Sunday panel on ABC News that gun violence in the United States was caused by mental illness, video games, violence in the media and even "unparented" boys from single-parent homes -- but they refused to accept that gun control was part of the problem.

"Look, I'm a concealed-carry permit holder," Chaffetz explained. "I own a Glock 23. I've got a shotgun. I'm not the person you need to worry about. And there are millions of Americans who deal with this properly. It's our Second Amendment right to do so. But we have to look at the mental health access that these people have."

"The gun rules are very stringent. There's a lot conjecture out there that I don't think would necessarily solve this particular problem. And I want to look at anything we think will solve all the problems, but we have to, I think, look at the mental health aspect."

"As a parent, we all shed a tear," Chaffetz added as he choked up. "You put violence and death and gore in a movie, you're not going to get an R rating. You do something else, okay. I got to tell you, I think the movie ratings are terribly misleading when it comes to violence, death, gore and glamorizing."

Will, however, pointed to boys in single-parent homes as a source of the problem.

"We ought to bring in Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago," he insisted. "Chicago is an epidemic of violence with young, largely unparented -- that is, no father in the home -- adolescent males. That's a problem quite separate from this."

The conservative columnist also worried that the massacre of 20 children at an elementary school in Chicago would be used to "ratchet up the security of schools and elsewhere in public spaces."

"Our public spaces are already blighted by this," Will ranted. "For generations, people have been using the water on the [National] Mall to run little sailing boats. Now, the government in its wisdom has banned remote-control little boats on the mall water in Washington because it somehow represents a security threat to the country. We have to be a little bit reasonable."

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CBS host Bob Schieffer on Sunday reflected on the recent massacre of 20 elementary school children in Connecticut and wondered "to what depths of horror must we sink" before lawmakers and politicians begin to take the issue of gun violence seriously.

"By now, the pros and cons of the gun issue are well known," Schieffer said in his Face the Nation commentary. "But here is the question that must be asked: Is what happened Friday the new normal? Of course, there are legitimate reasons for both pleasure and protection to own guns, but if the slaughter of innocent children is not bad enough to make us re-think what we can do to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, what is bad enough?"

"To what depths of horror must we sink before we say this cannot be tolerated? Are we willing to settle for a culture in which kindergarten children are no longer safe in the classroom and a visit to the mall or a movie is a life-threatening experience?"

"In recent years there has been no effort to address this problem, no piece of gun legislation was seriously considered during this session of Congress," he continued. "It is a subject no one wants to talk about for fear of offending the powerful gun lobby. It is time to remember what Ed Murrow told us, that we are not descended from fearful people. Our forefathers had the courage to tell the most powerful country of their day, 'You have gone too far, we can tolerate this no more.' And upon their courage, America was built. Have we, their descendants, become so afraid of the possible political consequences that we are unwilling to explore ways to make safer world for our children? I cannot believe we have. I think we are better than that."

During a panel segment later in the show, Schieffer asked Lehigh University professor Dr. James Peterson if the country had reached a "tipping point" to reverse the trend of gun laws becoming more lax in recent years.

"There's a way in which we're moving in two different directions at the same time," Peterson explained. "Proliferation of guns and the frequency of these kinds of mass shooting incidences, and then the other direction, our policy seems to be one that wants to be more freedom and more for a free-market system in terms of guns and gun ownership."

"You think about the whole terroristic element of this," he added. "This should be a new front on the war on terror. And it needs to be domestic, and it needs to be directed around some of these issues of the proliferation of guns."

Schieffer agreed: "That's the part that I find kind of interesting about this. After 9/11, we turned this culture upside down, we doubled defense budget. If this person had had -- I'm sorry to say this -- but if he had had an Arab name, people would be going nuts about what we ought to do right now. And yet, we can't seem to decide, is this a problem we can solve?"

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Sunday insisted that a tragic massacre at Sandy Forks Elementary School in Connecticut could have been prevented if Principal Dawn Hochsprung had been armed with an M4 carbine, an assault rifle designed by the U.S. military for urban warfare.

During an interview on Sunday, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Gohmert if he still believed that the country would be safer if more people were armed as he had said after a mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado earlier this year.

"Every mass killing of more than three people in recent history has been in a place where guns were prohibited -- except for one," the Texas Republican explained. "They choose this place, they know no one will be armed."

Gohmert became emotional as he continued: "You know, having been and judge and having reviewed photographs of these horrific scenes and knowing that children have these defensive wounds -- gunshots through their arms and hands as they try to protect themselves -- and hearing the heroic stories the principal, lunging trying to protect -- Chris, I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office locked up. So, when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn't have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids."

Wallace noted that when the Second Amendment was written, weapons like the AR-15 Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children last week -- which can shoot up to five rounds in a second -- did not exist.

"These were created for law enforcement, these were created for the military," Wallace observed. "Why does the average person -- I can understand a hunting rifle, I can understand and handgun -- why do they need these weapons of mass destruction?"

"Well, for the reason George Washington said: a free people should be an armed people," Gohmert replied. "It insures against the tyranny of the government if they know that the biggest army is the American people then you don't have the tyranny that came from King George."

"Once you start drawing the line, when do you stop?" he wondered. "You use your head and you look at the facts."