RFK Jr. blames pills—not guns—for school shootings

As secretary of Health and Human Services in the second Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pushed an array of pseudo-science and misinformation, foremost about vaccines. His approach has been to promote claims that are unsupported by evidence or have been disproven by scientific research, and to announce that HHS is pouring resources into studying those baseless claims. He also tends to imply that questions he raises have not yet been studied, when in fact they have been. Research has shown definitively, for example, that vaccines do not cause autism, despite Kennedy’s long-running efforts to stir that fear.

In similar fashion, Kennedy is now using his post as the highest-ranking US health official to spread the claim that psychiatric drugs are a key cause of mass shootings at the nation’s schools and beyond. The idea, essentially, is that antidepressants and other meds may inadvertently turn people into killers. There is no scientific evidence to support that theory—and extensive research indicates it is untrue. Nonetheless, Kennedy announced at a recent Turning Point USA event that “massive studies” of the theory are now underway at HHS. The HHS press secretary, however, declined to answer any of my specific questions about this purported research effort, and threat assessment and mental health leaders I spoke with voiced sharp skepticism.

Large research of this kind would require longterm planning, dedicated teams and substantial funding and typically would be outlined to the public, says psychologist Sarah DeGue, a violence prevention expert who served for the past decade as a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been gutting violence prevention programs and research since January.

“Everything we know suggests that these ‘massive studies’ do not exist—and there would be no scientific rationale for them even if they did,” DeGue, whose role at the CDC ended in June, told me. “This theory has been examined for decades. There is no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass violence.”

The generalized claim that commonly used pharmaceuticals known as SSRIs can make people violent—and that they supposedly gave rise to the shootings epidemic—has been around for a long time. It traces in part to an unscientific anti-Prozac campaign in the 1990s from the Church of Scientology, and gained some traction in online forums after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped create a miasma of lies claiming that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was faked, has also peddled the theory.

Proponents of the SSRI theory use anecdotal, often unconfirmed details about shooters’ health histories to argue causation. But multiple studies from experts in psychiatry, law enforcement, and public health show that the theory has no merit. Data on shooters spanning more than a decade from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit has been used specifically to examine the claim that psychiatric drugs are at the root of school shootings; independent researchers concluded from the FBI data that “most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications—and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.”

My inbox has been peppered with questions about the alleged role of SSRIs ever since I began doing deep research on mass shootings and how to prevent them more than 12 years ago. The persistence no doubt owes in part to the fact that the circumstances and behaviors of mass shooters are complex, and that the role of mental illness has long been widely misunderstood. But despite the SSRI theory failing under scientific scrutiny (additional details on that below), some commentators still use it to steer debate away from the regulation of firearms—including Kennedy, who has used that approach repeatedly in media and public appearances.

He did so again on Fox & Friends in late August, after the mass shooting of school children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. And in mid-November, Kennedy highlighted the same arguments during a Turning Point USA “fireside” chat at George Washington University.

A close look at Kennedy’s rhetoric on the subject is telling. Here next are his roughly two minutes of remarks at the TPUSA event, intercut with my analysis showing how he offered a barrage of misleading and false statements about guns, mass shootings, and psychiatric drugs.

When a young audience member commented that gun violence is the leading cause of death “for people our age” and asked why Republicans have not passed any legislation in response, Kennedy first insinuated that guns cannot be the source of the crisis:

Kennedy: “Is it really to do with the proliferation of guns? Because when I was a kid, we had roughly the same amount of guns per capita. And in fact, in some of the schools that I went to, there were gun clubs, and kids would come to school with their guns and nobody worried that they were going to start shooting people.”

That met with some applause from the young, conservative-leaning crowd, but for starters, Kennedy’s “per capita” preamble is flat-out wrong: In 1970, when he was 16 years old, there were an estimated 104 million civilian firearms in the United States, amid a population of just over 203 million. Today, there are more than 400 million firearms in circulation—a four-fold increase—amid a population of roughly 341 million. In other words, when Kennedy was a kid, there were enough guns to arm about half the population; now there is a gun for every single person in the country, and then some.

Moreover, Kennedy ignored the factthat the kinds of firearms widely available have changed dramatically. When gunmakers first began producing a civilian version of a military-style semiautomatic rifle in the 1960s, known as an AR-15, those new models were a bust with gun buyers. They are wildly popular today, though, with more than 20 million now in circulation—and these highly lethal rifles have become a top weapon of choice for mass shooters, as I reported in this investigation. Kennedy also glossed over another key change: The culture of responsible gun ownership that he seemed to wax nostalgic about was supplanted decades ago—thanks in no small part to a lucrative business model built by the gun industry and the National Rifle Association that markets aggression and militarism to young and middle-age men.

Kennedy: “In all of human history, there’s never been a time when a stranger would walk into a school room, or into a movie theater, and start shooting strangers. Why did that start happening in the 1970s and only in this country?”

Answer: It didn’t start happening in the 1970s, and it hasn’t only happened in this country.

As I documented in my book Trigger Points, a young man carried out a suicidal gun murder on the campus of Smith College in Massachusetts more than a century ago, in 1909. A school principal went on a deadly gun rampage at a Los Angeles middle school in 1940. The infamous clocktower massacre at the University of Texas, Austin, happened in 1966. There were school and mass shootings in the 1970s, too. Incidentally, Prozac, the first SSRI to go on the market in America, did so after being approved by the FDA—in late 1987.

In the current era, mass shootings in the US have increased (even when defining the phenomenon conservatively, as we do at Mother Jones), and they occur a lot more often here than in other countries. But despite the common assertion that these attacks are unique to America (often repeated as a way to lament the recurring tragedies), many such attacks have happened elsewhere: in Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, and beyond.

Kennedy: “One of the things that we’re looking at is SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs that have these black box warnings on them, and that began proliferating in lockstep with the school shootings and mass shootings. I’m trying to look at this in a rational, objective way and say, what changed? It wasn’t the proliferation of guns. We’ve always had guns. Something changed about human behavior. And it happened here, where we’ve got 20 percent of the population now taking these drugs. And the drugs, in their clinical trials, they saw suicidal, homicidal effects. There’s black box warnings on them saying, ‘may cause suicidal or homicidal ideation.’”

Kennedy’s premise is hardly subtle: The change is the drugs, ergo the drugs are likely the cause of the shootings crisis. But research 101 on any college campus would suggest the obvious first thing to ask here: Has this premise been amply tested?

Research has only continued to debunk the SSRI theory, as psychiatry experts Dr. James Knoll and Dr. Ronald Pies reaffirmed in an article in Psychiatric Times shortly after the mass shooting at the Minneapolis church. “Our focused review of several recent studies,” they wrote, “finds no credible evidence for this claim.” (Emphasis theirs.)

They note that Kennedy’s version of the premise itself is even half wrong. While labeling on some of these drugs cautions about possible suicidal ideation, “We can dismiss at once the false claim that any currently available antidepressants in the US have black box warnings regarding ‘homicidal ideation.’” Potential murder, in other words, is not a known risk factor.

They further observed that an analysis of the Columbia University Mass Murder Database shows that the lifetime prevalence of antidepressant use among mass shooters over the past 30 years is 4 percent—which is much lower than the estimated 11.4 percent of US adults who took antidepressants in 2023. (Moreover, in studying hundreds of mass shootings and threat cases over the years, including interviews with dozens of top experts, I know of no mental health or threat assessment practitioner who ever concluded that antidepressant treatment was a causal factor in a case.)

Kennedy: “We’re now doing massive studies on this issue to try to figure out why it is that all these shootings are happening here and never happened before.”

Kennedy promising improbable new projects also fits a pattern. Last April, referring to vaccines and other possible factors, he announced that at President Trump’s direction he had launched “a massive testing and research effort” on autism that would involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. “In September,” he said, “we will know what has caused the autism epidemic.” But by late fall, the only substantive updates were dubious claims from the administration regarding Tylenol and a set of highly provocative, unscientific changes to language about vaccine safety on a CDC website.

HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard declined to answer the specific questions I emailed about the scope, funding, and timeline for the research that Kennedy has now promised on meds and mass shootings. She instead referred me to a social media post by Kennedy from early November in which he emphasized, falsely, that the issue has not been studied: “Drawing on the nation’s most comprehensive data, the @CDCgov is finally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.”

Kennedy is certainly correct to highlight mass shootings as a major public health problem and to raise questions around the crucial factor of suicidality. A majority of mass shooters end their own lives, according to findings from our pioneering mass shootings database at Mother Jones and subsequent research elsewhere. (This also should be put in relative perspective: Those shooters are a tiny fraction of the roughly 27,000 people per year who die by gun suicide.)

It is not clear, though, whether the health secretary is at all serious about prioritizing research on solving gun violence. A leading threat assessment practitioner who works with the federal government was blunt about Kennedy’s rhetoric: “Obviously he couldn’t be more backwards on this,” the practitioner told me. “Under proper care, antidepressants help countless people who suffer from mental health struggles, and specifically with individuals where we are concerned about potential planning of violence, there are many cases where the threat management process benefits from the use of these and other medications.”

“Secretary Kennedy likes to talk about ‘gold standard science,’ but continuing to focus on a research question that has already been answered is not the practice of gold standard science,” says DeGue, who has also long taught on public health and violence prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “In this case, it is a distraction from the factors that truly drive mass shootings, like access to firearms, social and mental health crises, hate and racism, and violent extremism.”