Kennedy says NIH is studying causes of U.S. gun violence

The Make America Healthy Again Commission released a new 20-page report Tuesday, outlining Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s big pitch to President Donald Trump on how to address what the administration deems the underlying causes driving an uptick in childhood chronic diseases.

PBS News’ Lisa Desjardins asked the health secretary if there was any discussion of mental health and firearms, and looking at the health of children in relation to firearms, when working toward this new report.

“The firearms question is a complex question, and it’s not an easy question,” the health secretary said.Kennedy pointed to a “sudden onset of violence” in the 1990s when “somebody walks into a school or a church or a theater and start shooting strangers.”

This is something that isn’t happening in other countries, he added. “We’re having mass shootings every 23 hours,” he said, suggesting there are a number of possible connections, such as dependence on psychiatric drugs, video games or social media, that the National Institutes of Health is examining.

Experts have agreed that the U.S. is an outlier when looking at gun violence, which is among the leading causes of death for children and teens. NIH has previously stated a number of factors that may contribute to the public health crisis of gun violence in the country, including poverty, structural racism and access to guns. Kennedy said NIH is initiating studies that look at the “potential connection between overmedicating our kids and this violence and these other possible co-founders as well.”

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