Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) slammed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday, telling him to “shut up” for suggesting that psychiatric drugs taken by children could be connected to school shootings, including the shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday. 

A gunman opened fire at Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and injuring 17 other people. 

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“I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” Smith said on X. “Just shut up. Stop peddling bull****. You should be fired.”

RFK Jr. appeared on Fox & Friends on Thursday, where he suggested serotonin reuptake inhibitors could be to blame for school shootings. 

Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade asked Kennedy if his agency is examining possible connections between mass shootings and “drugs that are used in order to make that [gender] transition” happen. 

Robin Westman, the 23-year-old gunman in the Minnesota shooting, was born male and at 17 years old, applied for a name change to reflect a gender identity transition to female. 

“At [the National Institutes of Health], 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,” Kennedy said. “Many of [the drugs] have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation, so we can’t exclude those as a culprit.”

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Kennedy has long been a critic of SSRIs and pushed a similar theory last year when he told Tesla CEO Elon Musk during an X Spaces conversation that “prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events.” 

According to public health and medical researchers, SSRIs are prescribed for depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders, which are diagnoses common among transgender people. The drugs are not used to treat gender dysphoria specifically. 

Many researchers have pushed back on Kennedy’s claims. Medical studies show that most mass shooters suffer from untreated mental illness, and that there is no evidence connecting psychiatric drugs to mass shootings. 

It is currently unknown if Westman took SSRIs or underwent hormone therapies. 

The shooting has stirred up national conversations around gun violence, with Democrats arguing that the real cause of mass shootings is easy access to high-powered firearms. 

“There are 400 million guns in this country. More guns than people,” Smith said in a follow-up post on X. “In America, we are ten times more likely to be shot in a school or playground than any other developed nation.” 

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Conservative commentators and influencers have focused on Westman’s alleged gender change as a reason for the shooting, and fixated on Audrey Hale, a transgender person who killed six people at a Nashville elementary school in 2023.

A Violence Prevention Project report that analyzed almost 200 mass shootings between 1996 and 2004 found that only one was committed by a transgender person. The report defines a “mass shooting” as “four or more people shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.”