At a press conference tied to the Make Our Children Healthy Again report, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr [pictured] insisted the “sudden onset of violence” began in the 1990s. Apparently when he was a lad, everyone carried guns to school and no one was getting shot.

“We had comparably the same number of guns. Nobody was doing that. We had gun clubs at my school. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so, and nobody was walking into schools and shooting people.”

Kennedy noted that countries like Switzerland have plenty of firearms but almost no mass shootings. “We're having mass shootings every 23 hours,” he said.

Instead, he floated psychiatric drugs, social media and videogames as potential culprits.

“There are many, many things that could explain this. It could be there could be connections with videogames, with social media, or a number of things, and we are looking at that at NIH.”

Politicians blaming games for gun deaths is hardly new. Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama did the same, despite mountains of research showing no causal link.

It is worth pointing out that Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot Kennedy’s uncle in 1963, never played a videogame in his life.

The MAHA report itself did not bother to mention videogames, though it did waffle on about “screen time” and promised an education campaign by the surgeon general, a post that does not even exist at the moment.

Blaming joysticks instead of Glock 19s might keep the headlines rolling, but it will not explain why America’s gun death rate looks like something out of a bad action movie.