After four years of the Biden Administration blaming guns and gun owners for every violent crime, it’s refreshing to have members of the Trump Administration look at the issue differently. Specifically, RFK Jr. stating that guns are not the problem and will explore the effects of psychiatric drugs.
Focusing on the Real Problem, Not the Guns
One key component of the Biden tactic was to declare guns a “public health crisis,” a move that the Trump Administration reversed early on. Now, President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary is speaking out on guns in a different way following the recent mass murder at a Catholic grade school and church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
So, What’s Up?
Following the attack where a trans man fired into the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church as the children were participating in the beginning of the school year mass, killing two children and injuring 17 others, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that blaming the gun for the tragedy was nonsensical.
“People have had guns in this country forever,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “When I was a kid, we had shooting clubs at our school. Kids, my classmates, and other people would bring a .22 rifle and other guns to school and park in the parking lot. Nobody was shooting up schools.”
As Kennedy pointed out, such attacks on various public places on a widespread basis aren’t something that has been happening frequently since schools and public places were invented.
“There’s never been a time in the history of humanity where people walked into a crowd, or a church, or a movie theater, or a school, or a crowd of strangers and just started randomly shooting,” Kennedy said. “It’s happening in our country, it’s not happening around the world. And 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 that. Something changed, and it dramatically changed human behavior.”
What About Drugs?
Since guns aren’t the problem, Kennedy is trying to figure out what the root cause of these attacks could be. He now plans to look at the role certain drugs could be playing in the phenomenon.
“One of the culprits we need to examine is the fact that we’re the most overmedicated 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,” he said. “We are doing those studies right now for the first time, and we will have an answer.”
Of course, anti-gun Democrats, who are quick to blame guns, were even quicker to attack Kennedy for even mentioning that drugs could be somehow involved.
U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minnesota, went as far as calling for Kennedy’s firing just for asking the question of whether psychiatric drugs, far more widely prescribed to youth now than any time in the past, could be part of the equation. She even categorized Kennedy’s mention of the drugs as “peddling bullshit.”
“I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” Smith wrote on social media. “Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.”
Ultimately, since guns don’t fire themselves into churches full of children, there has to be another cause. Hopefully, Kennedy’s look into the widespread prescribing of certain drugs to troubled youth will answer the question one way or the other.
