Content warning: This story is about gun violence. The shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Sept. 4 has left four people dead, others injured, and the entire country devastated. The tragedy is the latest in a growing list of school shootings this year. At the time of publication, CNN reports the nation has already seen at least 45 school shootings in 2024 — 13 on college campuses and another32 in K-12 schools.
As the nation struggles with yet another tragedy, conversations around school safety and gun control are once again front and center. But it’s Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s response to the shooting that has taken over much of the discourse.
Vance responded to news of the shooting during a campaign event in Phoenix on Sept. 5. “I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” he told the crowd, before calling schools “soft targets” and advocating for stronger security at schools to prevent shootings from happening in the future.
It was the phrase “fact of life” in particular that sparked criticism, with people on social media claiming Vance’s phrasing lends to the normalization of school shootings. (Her Campus reached out to the Trump-Vance campaign for comment about the backlash, but didn’t hear back in time for publication.) Betsey Stevenson, a member of former president Barack Obama’s council of economic advisers, took to X to weigh in on Vance’s comment, saying, “They are not a fact of life. They do not happen in any other country but the United States.”
Kamala HQ, an official social media page of the Harris-Walz campaign, quickly jumped in on the conversation, releasing a statement following Vance’s speech that said in part, “Vice President Harris said ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’ in response to another senseless school shooting. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance think school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and ‘we have to get over it.’”
The latter quote in the statement refers to a comment Trump made on Jan. 5 of this year, following a school shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa. In a campaign appearance in Sioux County, Iowa, Trump said of the shooting, “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here, but we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
In response to the backlash over Vance’s recent comment, the Trump-Vance social media team fired back, accusing Kamala HQ of spreading fake news. “J.D. Vance does not say what they claim he said,” a post from Trump War Room, a social media page for the Trump campaign, said in part, encouraging people to watch the full video of Vance’s remarks.
While the Trump-Vance campaign insists Harris’s team twisted the quote, the words “fact of life” were indeed said by Vance. The real debate now seemingly centers around how those words are being interpreted — some argue his words reflect a bleak reality that Vance suggests can be changed with increased security; others see it as a way to accept that school shootings are just going to continue happening. With Georgia being a swing state this election, how the state’s voters interpret his quote about the shooting that happened on their home turf could actually weigh heavily on the outcome of the race.