Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance said that school shootings were simply a “fact of life” after a shooting at a Georgia high school left four dead — the 45th school shooting in the United States so far this year.
The comments, made at an Arizona rally on Thursday, come after Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz called for enhanced gun control measures in their own campaign rallies following the shooting.
“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said, bucking a question asked on gun control measures and instead championing efforts to spend more on school security, per the Associated Press. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”
Vance, who noted that the event was an “awful tragedy,” faced criticism in June for calling gun violence in schools a “fake problem” and called an attempt to ban bump stocks, used in the Las Vegas shooting that killed 60, a “huge distraction.”
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said at the Thursday rally. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”
At Apalachee High School, where a student killed four and injured nine more, a school resource officer was on site, and though they quickly stopped the shooter, they were unable to prevent those gun-inflicted deaths and injuries.
Vance’s comments drew strong condemnation from Fred Guttenberg, a gun control activist whose daughter was killed in a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
“School shootings are a fact of life? My daughter Jaime’s murder was a fact of life? I can’t wait to make your exit from having any say in our public safety a fact of life. I can’t wait to vote for @KamalaHarris and @Tim_Walz,” Guttenberg wrote in a post to X.
Former President Donald Trump, who in January told supporters after an Iowa school shooting that “we have to get over it,” has not announced official policies on gun control, though his campaign manager Chris LaCivita told conference-goers at a concealed carry event during the Republican National Convention that Trump would continue to oppose gun control efforts.