Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that the Department of Health (HHS) will research whether antidepressants contributed to yesterday’s deadly school shooting in Minneapolis when he was asked about gender affirming medical care in that context. The pledge follows a longtime habit of Republicans blaming mental illness for school shootings instead of access to guns

During a recent interview on Fox and Friends, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked,”[In regards to the shooter,] you are dealing with a person who is trans, that was transitioning. Are you going to be examining at all some of the drugs that are used in order to make that transition happening, to see if it plays a role [in shootings]?”

Kilmeade then pointed out that a 2023 school shooter in Nashville, Tennessee, was also trans, but didn’t mention that the vast majority of mass shooters have been white cisgender men. Claims linking gender-affirming care to violence are often driven by anti-trans rhetoric, which exploits isolated tragedies to villainize the broader transgender community

Kennedy answered, “We are doing those kinds of studies now. At [the National Institutes of Health], we’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor] drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. You know, many of them have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we need, we can’t exclude those as a culprit”