Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is being criticized by Vice President Kamala Harris and gun violence survivors for his comments in the wake of Wednesday’s school shooting near Atlanta.
Four people, including two children, were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and nine more were injured. The suspect, a 14-year-old male student, is in custody. According to law enforcement officials, the gun used in the attack was an AR-style assault rifle.
Speaking on Thursday at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, a reporter asked Vance to comment on the shooting and to detail his policy recommendations to prevent these attacks.
JD VANCE: Now look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves—we actually have been able to run an experiment on this—because you’ve got some states with very strict gun laws and you’ve got some states that don’t have strict gun laws at all, and the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings. And the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings too, so clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.
What is going to solve this problem, and I really do believe this, is look—I don’t like this, I don’t like to admit this, I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re—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 so that a person who walks through the front door—
We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.
Vance’s comments drew a negative response soon after he made them.
“School shootings are not just a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will,” Harris wrote on social media.
Ammar Moussa, spokesperson for the Harris campaign, further noted in a statement, “Donald Trump and JD Vance will always choose the [National Rifle Association] and gun lobby over our children. That is the choice in this election.”
People who have experienced the fallout from gun violence first hand also criticized Trump’s running mate.
“What kind of a response is that from someone with kids? I’m sure ignorance is bliss for Vance, but there’s actually nothing normal about school shootings and they’re entirely preventable,” Justin Funez, a gun violence survivor and a board member for the advocacy group Students Demand Action, said in a statement.
Fred Guttenberg, who became a gun safety advocate after his 14-year-old daughter was murdered in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, also pushed back against Vance.
“There are approximately 115,000 schools in America. There are fewer than 100 school shootings every year. That is not a fact of life, that is a fact of failed policy and failed politicians,” he wrote on X. “The idea that JD Vance would suggest we need to accept this as inevitable and prescribe the wrong solutions as a result is why he must never get close to the White House.”
Emphasizing security measures, rather than limits on the widespread availability of guns, has been the go-to policy recommendation of the scandal-plagued NRA following mass shootings.
Vance’s answer echoed this mindset and comes after the NRA lauded Trump for selecting Vance as his running mate. Randy Kozuch, chairman of the NRA Political Victory Fund called Vance an “outstanding choice” in a July press release and hailed Vance for his time in the Senate, where he “consistently stood against the Biden-Harris gun control agenda.”
Before Vance joined Trump’s latest presidential campaign, the NRA donated over $493,000 to the Ohioan’s successful 2022 Senate campaign.
Vance’s response to the shooting stands in contrast to Harris’ response to the tragedy, in which she said, “It does not have to be this way,” and reaffirmed her support for popular gun regulations.
Harris has been a long-time advocate for gun violence prevention, most recently as part of President Joe Biden’s administration, which passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first federal gun legislation to become law in decades.
