Did JD Vance Say School Shootings are a ‘Fact of Life’? What We Know

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance referring to school shootings as “a fact of life” has ignited a firestorm of criticism and Republican claims that he was misquoted.

Two students and two teachers were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday morning after a 14-year-old shooter opened fire and went on a rampage before surrendering to school resource officers, authorities said. The mass shooting quickly put gun violence back into the national political spotlight just two months before this year’s presidential election.

Vance, an Ohio U.S. senator who was selected as former President Donald Trump‘s running mate in July, was asked by CNN journalist Kit Maher at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday about which “specific policies” he would support to prevent further school shootings like the one in Georgia.

The senator called Wednesday’s shooting “an awful tragedy” and argued that praying and increasing security to guard against “psychos” at schools would be more effective in preventing further bloodshed than policies backed by Vice President Kamala Harris, which he claimed without evidence include plans to “take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them.”

“Strict gun laws is not the thing that is gonna solve this problem,” said Vance. “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 … 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.”

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it,” he added. “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.”

The Harris-Walz campaign quickly shared a portion of Vance’s answer and highlighted his “fact of life” comment while denouncing the senator for “attacking common sense gun safety reform” on X, formerly Twitter.

Harris later weighed in with the following: “School shootings are not just a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will.”

Vance responded by accusing the vice president of telling “lies” about his remarks, claiming that she “wants to take security out of our schools instead of protecting our children” and referring to her post as “more desperation from the biggest fraud in American politics.”

Others, including mass shooting survivors and family members of victims, also lashed out at Vance over the remarks.

“No JD Vance, my cousin Alex being shot and killed in his English classroom is not a ‘fact of life,'” wrote Samuel Schwartz, whose cousin Alex Schachter was killed during the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “What happened to Alex was preventable. We will never accept this as the norm.”

“No. I refuse to believe that watching kids come out of school in body bags is a ‘fact of life,'” Pulse nightclub shooting survivor Brandon Wolf wrote. “I won’t tell parents who’ve buried their children that it’s just ‘reality.’ It does NOT have to be this way. And it wouldn’t—if political cowards had more to offer than a shrug.”

“The person making this remark gets to speak at these events where firearms are prohibited,” lawyer Bradley P. Moss pointed out.

Parkland parent Fred Guttenburg responded with a strongly worded post that condemned Vance for suggesting that his “daughter Jaime’s murder was a fact of life,” referring to the Republican senator as a “miserable pr–k” and saying that he “can’t wait” to vote for Harris and running mate Tim Walz.

Newsweek reached out for comment to Vance’s office and the Trump-Vance campaign via email on Thursday night.

Supporters of the Trump-Vance campaign raged over an Associated Press (AP) headline not highlighting that Vance said he does not “like” school shootings being “a fact of life,” claiming that the headline omission meant that the senator had somehow been misquoted.

“Such a ridiculous lie! The @AP is fake news,” former Trump adviser Steve Cortes wrote. “What ⁦@JDVance⁩ actually said: ‘I DON’T LIKE that this is a fact of life.'”

“Look at what JD Vance said vs. what the media wrote,” wrote @BehizyTweets. “This isn’t just some mistake. This is criminal election interference, and everyone in the mainstream media needs to be in jail … JD: I don’t like like [sic] that this is a fact of life … AP: School shootings are a fact of life … We truly don’t hate them enough apparently.”

“New hoax just dropped!” far-right influencer account Libs of TikTok wrote. “AP claimed JD Vance said sh**tings are a ‘fact of life.’ JD Vance’s full quote was ‘I don’t like that this [sh**tings] is a fact of life.’ You don’t hate the media enough.”

However, the AP article did include the full quote and context from Vance, who did refer to school shootings as “a fact of life” despite also saying that he did not approve of what he called the “reality” of school shootings.

The AP later updated its headline to note that Vance “laments” that he believes school shootings are “a fact of life.”

Republican anger toward the media was also evident at the Arizona campaign event on Thursday, where Maher was greeted with a loud chorus of boos after mentioning that she was from CNN as she began speaking to Vance. The audience quieted down after Vance referred to her as “one of the good ones.”