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.”
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.