JD Vance laments school shootings as ‘a fact of life’

PHOENIX (AP) — School shootings are a “fact of life” and the U.S. needs to step up security to prevent more massacres like this week’s shooting that left four people dead in Georgia, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Thursday.

“If these psychopaths are going to attack our children, we have to be prepared,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix. “We don’t have to accept the reality we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We have to face it.”

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

“I don’t like that this is a reality,” Vance said. “But if you’re a psychopath and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are easy targets. And we need to beef up security in our schools. We need to beef up security so that if a psychopath wants to come in the front door and kill a bunch of kids, he can’t do it.”

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

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

Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential nominee, toured the blood-stained Florida classroom building where the 2018 Parkland High School massacre occurred. She then announced a program to help states that have laws allowing police to temporarily confiscate guns from people judges have deemed dangerous.

Harris, who heads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, has supported both stricter gun controls, such as banning sales of AR-15 and similar rifles, and better school security, such as making sure classroom doors are not locked from the outside as happened in Parkland.