JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security
PHOENIX — PHOENIX (AP) — Republican Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance said Thursday that he regretted that school shootings are a “fact of life” and argued that the US must tighten security to prevent more massacres like this week’s shooting. four dead left behind in Georgia.
“If these psychos come after our children, we have to be prepared for that,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix. “We don’t have to like the reality we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We have to deal with it.”
The Ohio senator was asked by a reporter what can be done to stop school shootings. He said that further restricting access to guns, as many Democrats advocate, will not end them, noting that they occur in states with both lax and strict gun laws. He praised efforts in Congress to give schools more money for security.
“I don’t like that this is a fact,” Vance said. “But if you’re a psychopath and you want to be in the news, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we need to improve security in our schools. We need to improve security so that if a psychopath wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of kids, he can’t.”
Vance said he doesn’t like the idea of his own children going to a school with tight security, “but that’s increasingly the reality we live in.”
He called the Georgia shooting a “terrible tragedy” and said the families in Winder, Georgia, need prayers and condolences.
Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harristhe Democratic presidential candidate, visited the blood-stained Florida classroom where the 2018 Parkland High School massacre took place. She then announced a program to help states that have laws that allow police to temporarily seize weapons from people judges deem dangerous.
Harris, who heads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, has supported stricter gun controls, such as a ban on the sale of AR-15 and similar rifles, and better security in schools, such as banning classrooms that can be locked from the outside, as in Parkland.