JD Vance gets slammed for coldhearted response to school shooting

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.