Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) on Sunday knocked Republican vice presidential candidate and Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) for saying he laments school shootings as a “fact of life” after a shooting at a Georgia high school left four people dead and several others injured last week.
“JD Vance claims that this kind of random, routine carnage is a fact of life. No, it’s not. It’s a fact of American life. This, again, is a tragic form of American exceptionalism,” Warnock said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
Vance, on a campaign stop the day after the shooting in Winder, Ga., called for tightened school security, stating he “doesn’t like that this is a fact of life.”
“If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix, Ariz. “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.”
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance added. “But 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. 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.”
Warnock, meanwhile, argued Americans need to do “serious soul-searching” to determine why the nation has experienced a high number of school shootings in comparison to other nations.
“Nowhere else in the world do you have a country that’s not at war do you see this kind of violence. And so we have to ask ourselves, we have to engage in serious soul-searching as Americans. Why does this happen here?” he said. “I hate it when people malign the mentally ill because most of them are not a danger to us. But there are people who are mentally sick in other countries. There are children who are troubled in other countries.”
“This only happens here. It’s the guns,” he said.
Warnock claimed Americans are “sitting ducks” and expressed his frustration that universal background checks have not been passed in Congress.
“Listen, there is no one single law that will stop all of these tragedies,” he said. “In a sense, I think we have to broaden the scope of the question because after all we have two mass shootings a day in our country, based on the data just last year. And this does not happen everywhere in the world.
“The problem is that we have politicians in our country who are beholden to the gun lobby. And either based on ambition or fear, they go to work every day doing their bidding while the gun lobby lines its pockets with the blood of our children,” Warnock said.
Warnock said he spent last Friday night with residents of Winder.
Colt Gray, 14, allegedly opened fire at Apalachee High School last week, killing two students and two teachers. He was charged with four counts of felony murder.
Vance described the shooting as an “awful tragedy” and called for prayers for the families in Winder. He called the alleged shooter “an absolute barbarian.”
Vance’s campaign said some of the media took his remarks out of context.
The Associated Press (AP), in a now-deleted social media post, wrote that “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security.” In an updated headline for its story and post, the AP said, “Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security.”
“This is yet another case of the fake news media brazenly lying about a Republican politician. Senator Vance said exactly the opposite of what the Associated Press claimed,” Vance spokesperson William Martin said Friday in a statement to The Hill.
The Vance campaign went on to criticize Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and her stance on firearm issues and school safety.
“Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has called for all police officers to be removed from schools, putting children all over America at risk. It’s yet another example of how Kamala Harris’s weak, failed, and dangerously liberal agenda makes her unfit for office,” Martin said in his statement.
The Hill has reached out to the Harris team for comment.