Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not agree with conventional party claims that access to guns alone has caused the rise in mass shootings, especially by youths.
Instead, he cites in part the increase on antidepressants and the use of video games.
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In a long-form, sit-down interview on the Club Random with Bill Maher podcast out next week, Kennedy recalled that as a kid he attended schools that had shooting clubs, and nobody thought of turning those guns on each other.
“We’ve always had guns. When I was a kid, there were schools that I went to where we had shooting clubs, and the kids brought their rifles to school and practiced. Kids always had access to guns,” he told an agreeing Maher.
“There’s no time in American history or human history that kids were going to shoot schools and shooting their classmates,” he said in the interview provided to Secrets.
But he said that changed with the use of depressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and Zoloft and violent video games.
“It really started happening co-terminus with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs,” he said on the show.
Kennedy cited a lawsuit in the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado that said one of the shooters was on an antidepressant.
“There’s a study out there that shows that 23% of mass shooters were on SSRIs,” he said.
While he didn’t claim it was the only cause, he did call for more studies on the connection.
“What [the National Institutes of Health] should be doing, because their portfolio is to protect human health, is to actually do real studies on this stuff, and they won’t because they don’t want to offend the big shots, video game companies, the cellphone companies, telecommunication industry or the pharmaceutical industry,” he said.
Kennedy has made the same claim about vaccine makers, especially those involved in producing COVID-19 vaccines, which he has been critical — though not dismissive — of.
President Biden and other Democrats have cited access to guns as the reason for mass shootings and called for several types of bans and regulations. Most of the anti-gun regulations, however, such as age limits and no gun zones that liberals support, have been in place for years and proven ineffective.
The discussion about guns came up after Maher said that Elon Musk quoted Kennedy blaming drugs for shootings. The discussion followed this way:
Kennedy: I didn’t actually say that.
Maher: I’m sure you didn’t, but the general—
Kennedy: I said it should be looked at.
Maher: It should, and you know what? I don’t even have to look at it. It is part of the issue. The gun issue is a number of things. If people could wrap their heads around more than one thing at once, yes, it’s about too many guns in the Second Amendment. It’s also about violence in movies and TV shows and seeing every fu*****—
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Kennedy: How about video games?
Maher: And video games. Having a 12-year-old boy, see every issue solved by way of a gun. No, that has no effect on it, and yes, the kids are on fu***** drugs. They’re on Prozac. Is that the main one? They’re all on this pharmaceutical.
