Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., laid into the top man in U.S. public health on Thursday after he suggested that antidepressants might be a root cause of a recent mass shooting in Minneapolis.
Two children were killed and 20 other people were injured on Wednesday when a shooter fired through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School during morning Mass. During a visit to “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, Kennedy was asked whether he thought the assailant was on a regimen of prescription drugs that could have led to the deadly attack.
“You are dealing with a person who is trans, who was transitioning. Are you going to be examining it all, some of the drugs that are used in order to make that transition happen, to see if it plays a role?” host Brian Kilmeade asked.
Kennedy stepped around the question to talk specifically about antidepressants: a longtime bugbear for the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“We are doing those kinds of studies now at NIH. 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,” he said. Many of them… had black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we can’t exclude those as a culprit, and those are the kind of studies we’re doing.”
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Smith seethed in a post to X, daring Kennedy to “go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do.” She pointed out that the U.S. has many millions more guns than it has people and noted that Americans are 10 times more likely to be shot on a playground or in a school than in “any other developed nation.”
“Just shut up. Stop peddling bulls**t,” she wrote. “You should be fired.”
I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do.
Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired. https://t.co/DC0uTWkQlb
— Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) August 28, 2025
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