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Kamala Harris has rebuked Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance for suggesting school shootings are “a fact of life” in response to the deadly attack on a high school in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday.
Four people were killed in the shooting at Apalachee High School after a gunman opened fire. Suspect Colt Gray, 14, a student at the school, has been charged with four counts of felony murder and is due to appear in court on Friday.
Responding to the horrific attack, Republican vice presidential nominee Vance, who was speaking at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, said: “I don’t like that this is a fact of life but if you are a psycho and you wanna make headlines, you realize schools are soft targets.”
“We have got to bolster security at our schools,” he added to a round applause. “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.”
In the same speech, Vance also claimed taking guns away was not going to solve the problem.
“We have to think about how to make this less common,” he said. “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....Clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that’s going to solve this problem.”
Democrats have since seized upon his comments, with Harris saying “it doesn’t have to be this way.”
“School shootings are not just a fact of life,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will.”
The Harris campaign also released a statement slamming the Ohio senator for his remarks.
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz know we can take action to keep our children safe and keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” spokesperson Ammar Moussa said.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance will always choose the NRA and gun lobby over our children. That is the choice in this election.”
But Vance hit back and accused the vice president of “lying”.
“Kamala wants to take security out of our schools instead of protecting our children. Instead of addressing her own failures, she lies about what I said,” he posted on X. “More desperation from the biggest fraud in American politics.”
