Kids once ‘encouraged’ to bring guns to school
Senator calls for RFK Jr. firing over school shooting comments
Sen. Tina Smith demanded HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s firing after his comments linking antidepressants to violence.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said guns are not to blame for the rise in school shootings, arguing this type of violence wasn’t prevalent when he was a student and kids were “encouraged” to bring firearms to school.
Instead, he pointed to psychiatric drugs, social media and video games as potential contributors during a press briefing on Sept. 9, where the Make America Healthy Again commission presented its latest report.
Kennedy also said the National Institutes of Health will be “initiating” studies to look into the “correlation and connection between overmedicating our kids and this violence.”
“We had gun clubs at school. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so and nobody was walking into schools and shooting people,” he said.
Although there’s limited data to support his claim, Kennedy was likely referring to the rifle clubs and targeting programs that were once popular in American high schools, according to anecdotal reports. USA TODAY has reached out to the National Rifle Association for comment.
It’s not the first time the Health Secretary has linked the rise in mass shootings to “overmedicalization.” In 2024, Kennedy speculated that antidepressant use could explain the rise of school shootings, despite a lack of scientific evidence to support such claims.
“There’s no time in American history or human history that kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” Kennedy told Bill Maher on an episode of the podcast “Club Random With Bill Maher” in April 2024. “It happened, you know, it really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”
Dr. Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the lead researcher of a 2022 study on mass murders, previously told USA TODAY there’s no evidence of a link between medication and shootings.
“SSRIs, and psych meds in general, are not responsible for mass shootings or violence in any way,” Girgis said in an email. “These psych meds have specific anti-violence properties.”
People with untreated serious mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence or self-inflict harm than be violent toward others.
How do SSRIs actually work?
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of antidepressants that treat depression and other mental health conditions by increasing levels of serotonin – a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood, appetite, sleep, memory, social behavior and libido – in the brain, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.3% of U.S. adults ages 18 or older had a major depressive episode in 2021; for those ages 18 to 25, this rate jumped to 18.6%.
SSRI use has increased over the years to treat mental health conditions. The monthly antidepressant dispensing rate for young people increased 66.3% from January 2016 to December 2022, according to a 2024 study in the journal Pediatrics.
Contributing: Alyssa Golberg
Adrianna Rodriguez can be reached at adrodriguez@usatoday.com.
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