J.D. Vance, campaigning in Michigan on August 27.
Photo: The Washington Post via Getty Im
On Wednesday, a 14-year-old student at Apalachee High School in Georgia entered campus with an assault rifle, killing two students and two teachers while injuring nine others in the first major school shooting of the fall semester.
It is now rote to say that the United States is the only country where school shootings routinely happen. And as it happens year after year, American politicians are obliged to offer their condolences. At a campaign rally on Thursday in Phoenix, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance spoke on the matter, calling the teenage killer an “absolute barbarian” who carried out an “awful tragedy.” But it was another quote that caused controversy.
“I don’t like this,” Vance said. “I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. 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.”
Soon after, the Associated Press wrote up the quote and tweeted it out with the caption: “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security.” Soon after that, the Vance campaign began complaining that the quote was taken slightly out of its original context.
“This is yet another case of the fake news media brazenly lying about a Republican politician,” Vance’s comms director told Fox News on Thursday night. “Senator Vance said exactly the opposite of what the Associated Press claimed. It should come as no surprise that the AP lost any and all credibility it had years ago, because they will lie about literally anything in order to prop up the Democrats.”
To call a slight collapse of context a “lie” is a bit of a stretch. Vance did call school shootings a fact of American life — but it’s simply a fact that he believes could be fixed with more good guys with guns. Still, the AP changed its tweet on Thursday night. It now reads:
If you agree that Vance said the “opposite,” that may reflect your political leanings and whether you think easy access to firearms is the root cause of gun violence. (Federal agents are now investigating if the gun used in the Apalachee shooting was the same firearm that the teenager’s father gave him as a Christmas gift last year, months after the teen was investigated for posting school-shooting threats. The father has been charged with second-degree murder.) In a campaign stop on Thursday, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said that “we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. You know it doesn’t have to be this way.”
As for bolstered security in American schools to deter school shootings, only a small number of attacks have been warded off by a security officer. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2021 found that there was no significant reduction in injuries when there was an armed guard during a shooting, and that school shootings involving an armed guard averaged three times more people killed. As the families of victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the Robb Elementary School can attest, police and security officers also need to act in the moment.
It could be helpful to refer to Vance’s boss to understand the Republican ticket’s approach to school shootings. In January, after the first fatal school shooting of the calendar year, Donald Trump tried to offer his condolences to the families of the student and teacher killed by a 17-year-old at a high school in Perry, Iowa. “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here,” he said. “But we have to get over it — we have to move forward.”
