Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t blink when asked about the rise of school shootings on Tuesday.
The question was loaded and meant to trap him into blaming guns. But Kennedy didn’t buckle at the weight of the moment or the question.
He was asked Tuesday by PBS News’ Lisa Desjardins if the health of children in relation to firearms and mass killings was considered in the Make America Healthy Again commission’s latest report.
“The firearms question is a complex question, and it’s not an easy question,” Kennedy responded.
He said plainly that gun ownership levels have not changed in decades.
“We had lots of guns when we were kids,” Kennedy explained.
“We had gun clubs at my school. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so, and nobody was walking into schools and shooting people,” he said.
It was a blunt reminder that the American culture around firearms used to be very different.
Kennedy said something shifted in the 1990s.
Has your respect for RFK Jr. increased since he took over HHS?
“We’re having mass shootings every 23 hours,” he said.
He compared the U.S. to Switzerland, where gun ownership is also widespread.
“Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago,” Kennedy said.
He then offered possible explanations for what went wrong.
“There are many things that happened in the 1990s that could explain these,” Kennedy said.
“One is the dependence on psychiatric drugs, which in our country is unlike any other country in the world,” he added.
WATCH: Kennedy is asked a tough question about why “looking at firearms” wasn’t included in the MAHA report.
He answered her question with class and grace, and you could hear a pin drop as the room hung on Kennedy’s every word:
“We had comparably the same number of guns [when I… pic.twitter.com/oF4kBzFR9x
— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) September 9, 2025
“There could be connections with video games and social media.”
He said the NIH is “initiating studies to look at the correlation and the potential connection between over-medicating our kids and this violence.”
Kennedy didn’t duck. He didn’t play politics. He said what millions of people already know, which is that America’s problem is not the gun. It is the soul of the person holding it.
So many young people have no respect for life and community that once held families together.
Democrats could outlaw firearms, and people bent on committing mass murder would still find ways to kill.
Scapegoating the Second Amendment is a tried-and-true method for Democrats and the legacy media. Both are curiously opposed to controlling violent thugs by imprisoning them, so they can’t kill innocent women on public trains and elsewhere.
Many conservatives, including this writer, were skeptical of Kennedy running HHS. But he might be the only former lifelong Democrat who would answer a baited question about firearms with sincerity and facts — not rhetoric.
He did not take refuge in a platitude or use the moment to attack law-abiding Americans.
Instead, he called attention to what really changed in society, which has been the introduction of psychiatric drugs, new technology, and other potential factors.
It’s also worth noting that we live in a culture that has stripped God from the public square.
But as Kennedy alluded to, a gun is no more dangerous than a paperweight until it is in the hands of someone whose heart is dark.
That is not a partisan truth. That is reality.
Kennedy hit his response to PBS out of the park, and Americans of all backgrounds and opinions should pray HHS finds answers to America’s epidemic of evil under his watch.
Guns have been around children in America since its founding.
It’s refreshing to have a public health official point out that inconvenient fact to the media, so he can move on to using all the resources at his disposal to look for an actual solution.
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