Another week, another mass shooting, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is back on his soapbox about SSRIs.

The newly minted Health and Human Services Secretary responded to this week's Minneapolis church shooting - where two kids died during their first week of school and 17 others were injured - by doubling down on his pet theory that antidepressants cause mass violence. Never mind that actual researchers debunked this idea years ago. Kennedy's got a hunch, and apparently that's enough to drive federal health policy now.

"We're launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence," Kennedy told Fox News, because of course he did.

Ignoring the Research

Here's the kicker: Kennedy keeps claiming there's no research on this topic while simultaneously ignoring the research that exists. Back in 2019, the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law published a study that found most school shooters had zero history of taking psychiatric medications. And, among those who did, the researchers found "no direct or causal association" between the drugs and violence. But why let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?

This isn't some new obsession for Kennedy. He's been beating this drum since at least 2023, when he started his quixotic presidential run. That summer, he told Elon Musk during one of those interminable X livestreams that there's "tremendous circumstantial evidence" linking SSRIs, benzos, and other medications to school shootings.

The really disturbing part came last July when Kennedy suggested sending people on psychiatric medications to "wellness farms" funded by taxpayers. Wellness farms for people taking Prozac and Adderall. If that sounds uncomfortably close to labor camps for the mentally ill, you're not alone in making that connection.

Now Kennedy's got actual power, and he's using it to chase phantoms while real kids die in real shootings. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the Minneapolis tragedy marks at least the 57th school shooting of 2025. We're not even through the first full school year of his tenure, and Kennedy's response is to investigate medications that help millions of Americans manage depression and anxiety.

JD Vance Follows Suit While Ignoring Underlying Issue

JD Vance seems to be singing from the same hymnal. After the Minnesota shooting, the VP started talking about America's "mental health crisis" and how we "take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth." He suggested it's "time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence."

Notice what neither Kennedy nor Vance wants to talk about? Guns. The actual weapons used in these shootings. The things that fire the bullets that kill the children.

Instead, they're pointing fingers at medications that have helped countless people avoid suicide, manage crippling depression, and live functional lives. It's almost like they need a scapegoat that isn't the firearms industry or the politicians who block every attempt at sensible gun regulation.

A Bad Rap for SSRIs

The cruelty of this deflection can't be overstated. Millions of Americans rely on SSRIs to get through their days. These medications aren't perfect - nothing in medicine is - but they've saved lives. Now the country's top health official is suggesting they're turning people into mass murderers based on nothing but his own uninformed speculation.

What makes this even more maddening is that we actually know quite a bit about what contributes to mass shootings. Access to firearms, previous domestic violence, social isolation, exposure to extremist ideologies - there's real research on all of this. But addressing any of those factors would require actual policy changes that might upset certain constituencies.

So instead, we get Kennedy's wellness farms and investigations into Prozac. We get Vance's hand-wringing about psychiatric medications while refusing to even consider whether maybe, just maybe, the problem is that disturbed individuals can easily acquire weapons capable of killing dozens of people in minutes.

The Sad Truth

The Minneapolis shooting should be a moment for serious reflection about gun violence in America. Instead, it's become another opportunity for the administration to push pseudoscientific theories that demonize mental health treatment.

Fifty-seven school shootings this year. Two dead kids in Minneapolis. Seventeen injured. And our Health Secretary's response is to blame antidepressants.

This isn't just incompetent governance. It's a deliberate distraction from the real causes of gun violence, wrapped in fake concern about mental health. The only thing more depressing than Kennedy's theory is that he now has the power to waste federal resources investigating it while more kids die at the hands of gun violence.