JD Vance echoes debunked claim about what's driving mass shootings

Vice President JD Vance is drawing on a decades-old conspiracy theory that falsely claims antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings.

Speaking to steelworkers in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on Thursday, the Vice President addressed the mass shooting a day earlier at a Minneapolis Catholic school—where two young children were killed during Mass and 17 others were wounded, including a dozen children—when he declared that America faces a mental health crisis and alleged that Americans take too much psychiatric medication.

“We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence,” Vance declared, after speaking at length about the shooting. “I’m going to be part of that and the First Lady and the President are going to be part of that, but that’s gonna be an American conversation that we’re gonna have together.”

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Multiple studies have found no evidence that antidepressants cause mass shootings.

“The suggestion that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings has been amplified by right-wing figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson,” The Washington Post reported last year. “But experts caution there is no credible research linking antidepressants to mass shootings. Studies show only a small percentage of mass shooters were taking medications or suffering from serious mental illness when they committed the crimes.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly tried to link antidepressants with gun violence, and like Vance, did so again on Thursday.

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“We are doing those kind of studies now at NIH, we’re launching studies on potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence,” Kennedy said.

“You know, many of them, on their — had black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation,” he alleged. “So we can’t exclude those as a culprit and those are the kind of studies that we’re doing.”

Some critics slammed the Vice President.

“Three years ago, Republicans killed a bill to expand mental health services in schools. Then, the Trump-Vance administration defunded school counselors and social workers,” charged Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Brandon Wolf.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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