The Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance said that school shootings were simply a “fact of life” after a shooting at a Georgia high school left four dead — the 45th school shooting in the United States so far this year.
The comments, made at an Arizona rally on Thursday, come after Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz called for enhanced gun control measures in their own campaign rallies following the shooting.
“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said, bucking a question asked on gun control measures and instead championing efforts to spend more on school security, per the Associated Press. “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 strongly disagree. I’m about as Pro 2nd Amendment as it gets but what happened in Georgia was entirely preventable. The father should not have provided a firearm to a minor and especially not to a minor with a history of making threats.
Parents need to start going to jail for that kind of behavior and gun owners overall need to start securing their firearms so that children cannot get to them.
It’s not that damn difficult to do.
I agree.
But I’d wager my life savings that laws holding parents accountable will either simply be unenforced or fail to pass in most of this country.
I want it to be different but it’s never going to happen. School shootings are a fact of American life whether we like it or not. That’s just reality.
It’s slowly changing.
The father involved in this Georgia shooting was arrested. The parents involved in the 2021 Michigan shooting were arrested, charged and sentenced to 10-15 years.
I like those headlines as much as the next guy, but a year from now, would it surprise you if these are still the only two instances of parents being held accountable?
Yes it would. Adults, including parents, are increasingly being charged in other types of shootings such as when one child is playing with a firearm and accidentally shoots someone else. It’s not happening often enough yet but it’s growing in popularity. If you can remember long enough, I know I won’t, check back in a year and lets see what happened. :)
I respect your honesty. I think gun control’s going to take a few steps backward before then, myself. We’ll see how it goes.
Are there ways to lower the number of school shootings? Yes, and you’ve already made some great points.
However, are there ways to prevent school shootings from ever happening again? Well, the answer is unfortunately no. Guns exist and even the strictest laws and bans could never change that. School shootings still sometimes happen in countries with far stricter laws too.
It’s one of the logical traps conservatives love to use though: They lean on the fact that it is impossible to completely fix a problem and thus also dismiss any attempts to improve things even slightly because they still see any imperfect solution as a failure.
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Yes, I agree those factors probably contribute to the fact that the US experiences far more school shootings than any other country in the world, but again while far more infrequent, there still have been school shootings in Canada, Australia, Europe, and many other places.
Keep in mind that I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but if we were to fix the things you mentioned: toxic masculinity is erased from the public consciousness and the government gives free mental health support to everyone, can you guarantee on your life that a school shooting would never ever happen again for any reason? Simple yes or no answer to satisfy Mr. Vance.
The United States generally has a violent culture. If you removed every shooting of any type (school, mass, crime of passion, etc) from the crime statistics the US would still have a higher rate of violent crime than any other industrialized Western nation.
Aside from that it’s time to stop blaming Reagan for the mental health crisis in this country. Aside from the fact that our mental health system was a horror show when Reagan ended it the guy hasn’t been President for over three decades. That’s plenty of time for individual States and / or the Federal Government to have reversed course.
There is no country with more firearms per capita than the United States.
Even if you go by household, to reduce the effect of people who have more than one firearm, the U.S. still ahead of any other nation.
To be clear we can and should do more to reduce gun violence in the United States and small things like prosecuting adults who are accessories to shootings are a good thing.