There was another school shooting this week, which was the first week of school for many American kids. A 14-year-old with an AR-style weapon murdered four people at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Two students and two teachers are dead, the shooter is in custody, and the authorities have also arrested the shooter’s father. First and foremost, we need another ban on assault-weapons. There is no reason for anyone – especially a 14-year-old – to have access to an AR-15. The shooter’s father apparently gave the weapon to his son as a gift, terrifyingly enough (and an explanation for why the father has been arrested). All of this is a tragic backstory for JD Vance’s latest political masterstroke: telling an audience in Arizona that school shootings are a fact of life.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Thursday that he lamented that school shootings are a “fact of life” and argued the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia.

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix. “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 Ohio senator was asked by a journalist what can be done to stop school shootings. He said further restricting access to guns, as many Democrats advocate, won’t end them, noting they happen in states with both lax and strict gun laws. He touted efforts in Congress to give schools more money for security.

“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”

Vance said he doesn’t like the idea of his own kids going to a school with hardened security, “but that’s increasingly the reality that we live in.”

[From AP]

“These psychos” = a 14-year-old who was on the authorities’ radar for months, who was gifted a weapon of war by his father. Instead of shrugging and saying what amounts to “it is what it is,” perhaps some common-sense gun laws would be more effective? It’s also pathetic because after that Republican shot up Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally in July, both Trump and Vance are doing their stump speeches behind walls of bulletproof plexiglass, like the late, great Hannibal Lector.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.