RFK Jr, HHS investigate meds taken by trans Minnesota Catholic school shooter

“I certainly consider mass shootings a health crisis, and we are doing for the first time real studies to find out what the ideology of that is. And we're looking for the first time at psychiatric drugs,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy compared the current climate of gun crime with his own upbringing, arguing that widespread gun ownership is not a new phenomenon. “People have had guns in this country forever. When I was a kid, we had shooting clubs at our school. People, kids, my classmates, other people, would bring a .22 rifle or their guns to school and park it in the parking lot. Nobody was shooting.”

He said the pattern of indiscriminate violence seen today is without precedent. “There’s never been a time in America, in the history of humanity, when people walked into a crowd, into a church or a movie theater or a school or a crowd of strangers and just started randomly shooting. It’s happening in our country. It’s not happening around the world.”

Kennedy said the issue cannot be explained by the prevalence of firearms alone. “There are many other countries that have comparable levels of guns that we have in this country. We had comparable levels in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and people weren’t doing it. Something changed, and it dramatically changed human behavior.”

He pointed to psychiatric medication as a possible factor. “One of the culprits we need to examine is whether the fact that we are the most over-medicated nation in the world, and a lot of those are psychiatric drugs that have black box warnings on them that warn of suicidal and homicidal ideation. So we are doing those studies right now for the first time, and we will have an answer.”