Archived version

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.”