Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must be driving the progressives, who formerly adored him, nuts.

I realize that he has taken a lot of abhorrent positions; for example, his demand that the Koch Brothers be imprisoned because they are "treasonous" for "polluting" the air with CO2.  So I temper my enthusiasm with a desire that he formally repudiate such nonsense.  But for the moment, I want to enjoy him awakening to and announcing his opposition to the totalitarian drift of the United States, under the leadership of his Democrat party.

Yesterday, speaking to Mark Steyn, he crossed a red line for his party and implicitly defended the Second Amendment by potentially linking the rise in school shootings to the rise in the use of SSRI anti-depressants, not to the proliferation of guns.  First of all, the U.S. administers four times as many as the average European country.  Second, the rise in mass shootings parallels the rise in SSRIs.  And third, Switzerland has even more guns per capita, but few to no mass shootings, along with far less use of SSRIs.

Here is a rush transcript via Grabien, along with the video clip:

Kennedy JR.: "The same is true, Mark, with all these shootings. Nobody is looking at the pharmaceutical contribution to that. Anecdotally, it appears that almost every one of these shooters were on SSRIs or some other psychiatric drug, and this is only happening in America, where all these people are taking these psychiatric drugs. We take four times as many as any other country in the west, average European country. And there's no time in history — I mean, we've always had guns in this country. Switzerland has more guns per capita than we do, and you don't see that happening there. And I'm not defending all the guns everywhere, but I'm just saying, something happened. Prior to the introduction of Prozac, these kind of — those shootings just were almost unknown. And now they're, you know, they're an everyday affair. But NIH will not study that because it will offend the pharmaceutical industry, and it's something that we ought to be studying."

Photo credit: Grabien video screen grab.