Mass shootings in America might be fanned by the country’s utilization of psychiatric drugs, video game aggression, and social media, the United States’ Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., indicated. He created a national uproar for the remarks.
Speaking at a September 9 briefing for the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission, which he chairs, Kennedy said mass shootings now occur “every 23 hours” in the United States. He compared that frequency to Switzerland, which he claimed has not seen a mass shooting in “23 years.”
“There are many things that happened in the 1990s that could explain these,”
Kennedy said.
“One is dependence on psychiatric drugs… there could be connections with video games and social media.”
Kennedy added that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would launch new studies to examine possible links between these factors and gun violence.
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Kennedy’s remarks accompanied the release of a 20-page Make Our Children Healthy Again report, which covered chronic disease and behavioral health in youth. But it made no mention of firearms despite guns being the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers since 2022.
That omission drew immediate backlash. The American Academy of Pediatrics called it “a dangerous oversight,” while the advocacy group Defend Public Health accused Kennedy of distracting from the single greatest risk to our children’s lives firearms.
According to CDC data, more than 2,500 children died from gunshot wounds in 2022. Firearms accounted for nearly 30% of all deaths among teens ages 15 to 17.
The controversy has quickly spilled into politics. Members of Congress from both parties criticized Kennedy’s remarks, arguing they distract from the urgent need for firearm safety laws. Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) accused Kennedy of
“telling grieving parents to blame medicine and media, while ignoring the gun in the room.”
Reports also surfaced of walkouts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where more than 600 employees were dismissed earlier this year under Kennedy’s tenure. Public health unions say morale has collapsed.
Meanwhile, conservative commentators on outlets such as Fox News and The Daily Wire praised Kennedy’s willingness to “look beyond the gun lobby’s narrative.”
Despite the uproar, Kennedy insists the NIH studies are necessary.
“We can’t afford to close our eyes to any possible cause,”
He said during a PBS interview.
“Our children’s lives are at stake.”
But experts warn that the science may not validate his hunch.
“Decades of research point to firearm access as the key variable,”
Said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and gun violence researcher.
“Everything else is noise until we address that.”
For now, the question looms Will federally funded NIH studies change how Americans view the roots of mass shootings, or will the debate return as it so often does to the nation’s unique access to guns?
