Vance cites mental health crisis in remarks about Minneapolis shooting

Speaking at an event in Wisconsin, Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. takes "way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth."

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that it's time to start asking tough questions about what's at the heart of mass shootings and appeared to connect the violence to what he called a "mental health crisis."

"We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America. 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 said at an event in Wisconsin in his first public remarks about Wednesday's church shooting in neighboring Minnesota, in which two children were killed.

In an interview Thursday on Fox News, Vance called the shooter a "mentally deranged human being."

Earlier in the day, in a separate Fox News interview, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he has the National Institutes of Health looking into links between violence and antidepressants that are regularly prescribed to millions of people in the United States.

"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.