US school shootings are a 'fact of life', says Republican VP nominee JD Vance

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a “fact of life” and argues the United States needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia.

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said on Thursday at a rally in Phoenix.

“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.”

The Ohio senator was asked by a journalist what can be done to stop school shootings. He said further restricting access to guns, as many Democrats advocate, won’t end them, noting they happen in states with both lax and strict gun laws. He touted efforts in Congress to give schools more money for security.

“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said.

“But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise 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.”

Vice-President Kamala Harris criticised Vance’s comments in a post on X.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she wrote.

Vance said he doesn’t like the idea of his own children going to a school with hardened security, “but that’s increasingly the reality that we live in”.

He called the shooting in Georgia an “awful tragedy,” and said the families in Winder, Georgia, need prayers and sympathy.

Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, toured the bloodstained Florida classroom building where the 2018 Parkland high school massacre happened. She then announced a program to assist states that have laws allowing police to temporarily seize guns from people judges have found to be dangerous.

Harris, who leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, has supported both stronger gun controls, such as banning sales of AR-15 and similar rifles, and better school security, like making sure classroom doors don’t lock from the outside as they did in Parkland.