Harris Campaign Lies About JD Vance's Georgia Shooting Comments
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U.S. Senator J. D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People's Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan. Photo by gage skidmore
“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 if you want to make headlines, you realize our schools are soft targets,” said Ohio Senator JD Vance on the campaign trail. “We’ve gotta 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.”
Vance spoke these words just after a deadly school shooting in Georgia that took the lives of two students and two teachers. The killer was only 14 years old but was already known to the FBI. A year prior, they investigated the young man for online threats made on Discord, but they cleared him because the tip could not be substantiated. The Discord account linked to the shooter said, “im committing a mass shooting and im waiting a good 2-3 years.” When the authorities did a wellness check, his father had guns but claimed his son didn’t have unfettered access to them. Yet, his father purchased a rifle for his son later that year. His father has also been arrested in relation to the mass shooting.
Some psychopaths are determined to hurt people, and the authorities have a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable. If that sick individual sees weakness in our defenses, they will hurt the innocent. That is the “fact of life” Vance was referring to.
But Kamala Harris and Tim Walz took this tragedy as an opportunity to lie and attack their political opponents. In a statement released by the Harris-Walz campaign, they said:
Yesterday, Vice President Harris said, “it doesn’t have to be this way” in response to another senseless school shooting. Donald Trump and JD Vance think school shootings are a “fact of life” and “we have to get over it.”
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. Donald Trump and JD Vance will always choose the NRA and gun lobby over our children. That is the choice this election.
JD Vance was originally taken out of context by the Associated Press. “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security.” This now-deleted post got over 2.2M impressions on X. Even their correction is inaccurate. “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and says the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shootings this week that left four dead in Georgia.”
The false narrative by the AP was quickly pushed by Harris’ campaign page on X, and amplified by the candidates. Governor Tim Walz called Vance “pathetic” and said our kids “deserve better.” Kamala Harris is promising to take action.
When Harris ran for president in the 2020 election, Harris called for mandatory gun buybacks and promised to take executive action on firearms if Congress would not act in the first 100 days. When Joe Biden said you can’t use executive orders in that way for guns, she laughed. “Yes, we can.”
The White House page on X called for bans on “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, requiring safe storage of firearms, universal background checks, ending immunity for manufacturers, and passing a national red flag law.
Gun control will likely be a topic at the debate on September 10, and for the remainder of the election, especially since Georgia is an important swing state. But if Harris and Walz repeat the “fact of life” narrative, they will be lying to the American people, just as they openly lie about the debunked “losers and suckers” claim and the “very fine people” hoax.
Americans need to have grownup conversations about how we can protect our children in schools, but taking the opportunity to attack JD Vance over his desire to protect them is not helpful.
