Rep. Steve King: Big Pharma is paying families to keep quiet about the role of medication in mass shootings

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Thursday alleged that medication is partly to blame for mass shootings--and that "Big Pharma" is paying families to keep quiet about it.

Speaking at a "politics and pizza" event, King told constituents they shouldn’t focus on gun control amid growing calls for legislative solutions to school shooting in the United States.

"It isn’t the gun,” King argued. “There’s a whole series of things that are part of it.”

King insisted mass shootings like the one last month in Parkland, FL are “in our culture now.”

"We are medicating our children with Ritalin from kindergarten on up and other medication that’s there,” King said, “When they’re going on that medication, they’re more dangerous than before when they started. When they get their medication stabilized, it’s OK in many cases, when it’s balanced these pharmaceuticals are good but when they stop taking them, when they’re going off of those drugs they’re more dangerous than they were before they started to take them.”

As the Des Moines Register reports, “King alleged ‘Big Pharma’ pays families to keep quiet, but he's heard through back-channels about the role prescribed drugs may play in shootings.”

The Iowa representative also argued the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas, which killed 13 people, occurred “three years after they took prayer out of our public schools.”

"And then in 1990 they passed the legislation that turned our schools into gun-free zones,” King said. “Gun-free zones and then we saw mass killings in our schools at a rate of about one every year and a half.”

"Families are breaking up, prayer’s out of the public school, we have kids that are playing the video games day and night they kill—all day and all night without consequence because they live again even when they’re killed in the video," he said. "Put this all together I want to study every one of these killers and I want to understand what the common denominators are, what we can do to reduce or eliminate (them)."