Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested there was a problem in the United States because children could not "bring their guns" to school.
During a news conference in Texas on Thursday, Kennedy was asked about whether he considered mass shootings a public health crisis following the Wednesday massacre at a church in Minneapolis.
"I certainly consider mass shootings a health crisis," the secretary said. "And we are doing, for the first time, real studies to find out what the ideology of that is. And we're looking for the first time at psychiatric drugs."
"You know, these kinds of mass shootings, people have had guns in this country forever," he continued. "When I was a kid, we had shooting clubs at our school. People, kids, my classmates, other people would bring a .22 rifle with their guns to school and park it in the parking lot."
Kennedy insisted that there had "never been a time in America in the history of humanity" when people "just started randomly shooting."
"It's happening in our country," he pointed out. "It's not happening around the world."
"Something changed, and it dramatically changed human behavior," Kennedy remarked. "And one of the culprits we need to examine is whether the fact that we are the most over-medicated nation in the world. And a lot of those are psychiatric drugs that have black box warnings on them that warn of suicidal and homicidal ideation."
"So we are doing those studies right now for the first time, and we will have an answer."
In 1996, Arkansas Rep. Jay Dickey (R) amended a budget bill to ban the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun violence.
Watch the video below from C-SPAN.