Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reaffirmed his belief that violent video games may be a factor in the rise of mass shootings in the U.S.
Kennedy on Tuesday held a meeting with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission to discuss the commission’s strategy to improve the health of children. While answering a question about protecting children from gun violence, Kennedy said:
Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago. We’re having mass shootings every 23 hours.
There are many, many things that happened in the 1990s that could explain these. One is dependence on psychiatric drugs — which is, in our country, is unlike any other country in the world. There could be connections with video games, with social media. There are a number of things, and we are looking at that at [the National Institute of Health].
That stance is nothing new from Kennedy. Prior to the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in office — when Kennedy was still running his own presidential campaign — Kennedy blamed mass shootings on antidepressants and video games in an interview on a Turkish show in January 2024.
In response to the school shooting in Minneapolis, Kennedy said he was opening an investigation into the connection between shootings and medication. He received significant pushback for those comments when Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) grilled him as a recent Senate Hearing, and Kennedy accused her of “making stuff up” and “twisting” his comments on Fox.
