US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has suggested that antidepressants and ‘transition’-related drugs may have played a role in Wednesday’s mass shooting in Minneapolis, where gunman identified as Robin Westman killed two children inside a Catholic church. Kennedy during a Fox & Friends interview on Thursday said, his department will launch studies to determine whether psychiatric medications like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) contribute to violent behaviour.

While responding to a question “You are dealing with a person who is trans, who was transitioning. Are you going to be examining at all any of the drugs that are used in order to make that transition happening, to see if it plays a role?”, Kennedy said, “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”.“Many of them have black-box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we can’t exclude those as a culprit, and those are the kind of studies we are doing,” he added.

Mental health, not guns? MAGA’s core argument on mass shootings

For MAGA conservatives, mass shootings are increasingly framed as a mental health crisis rather than a gun problem. Vice President JD Vance echoed the same sentiment, linking Wednesday’s church massacre to mental health, calling the shooter a “mentally deranged human being”. In an interview on Fox news on Thursday, vance noted that Americans consume more psychiatric drugs than any other country. “We really do have a mental health crisis in the United States,” Vance said, urging a deeper probe into the “root causes of violence.” Kennedy stressed that unlike in other countries, US society has seen an explosion of random mass killings. “Something changed,” he said, hinting that psychiatric overmedication may have altered human behaviour.

How MAGA will blame anything but guns

While Democrats continue to press for tighter gun laws, MAGA leaders have doubled down on alternative explanations — from mental illness to prescription drugs. Kennedy has repeatedly argued that firearms themselves are not the trigger. Kennedy claimed in 2023 that kids have always had guns, but school shootings started happening “with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.” Critics accuse Republicans of using this argument to shield the powerful gun lobby. Kennedy, during his Senate confirmation hearing, even likened SSRIs to heroin in terms of addictiveness — a claim widely debunked by researchers.

Is US in the middle of a ‘trans-shooter epidemic’?

The Minneapolis shooter, 23-year-old Robin Westman was identified as a transgender woman.According to court documents, Westman was previously known as Robert Paul Westman and had petitioned to change the name in 2019, when still a juvenile. The application, filed by Westman and supported by mother Mary Grace Westman, stated that the teenager “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.” The FBI has described the attack as both “terrorism” and a “hate crime” targeting Catholics. On MAGA social media, the incident was swiftly branded part of a wave of “trans-terrorism.” Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson claimed that a pattern of “trans shooters” has emerged, citing six cases since 2018. “The modern trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children,” he wrote. But fact-checks show the narrative is exaggerated: only three of the cited shooters — Nashville (2023), Denver (2019) and Aberdeen (2018) — were confirmed transgender or nonbinary. In other cases, claims about suspects’ gender identities were either unverified or later contradicted by authorities, the Newsweek reported. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pushed back, warning against vilifying the trans community. “Those who direct hate toward trans people have lost their sense of common humanity,” he said.