In Context: Here’s what JD Vance said about school shootings being a ‘fact of life’ (transcript)

A day after a 14-year-old student with an AR-style weapon killed four people at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance answered a reporter’s question about the shooting.

"In the wake of the Georgia school shooting yesterday, I wanted to ask you, what specific policies do you support to end school shootings like this?" CNN reporter Kit Maher asked during a Sept. 5 campaign stop in Phoenix.

Soon after, Vance’s answer — which included the phrase "fact of life" —  became fodder for his critics.

"JD Vance responds to the deadly shooting in Georgia by saying school shootings are just ‘a fact of life’ and attacking common sense gun safety reform," Kamala HQ, the Harris campaign’s social media account, wrote Sept. 5 on X. Harris reshared it on her campaign account.

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said Sept. 7 at a Human Rights Campaign National dinner, "It’s ‘a fact of life’ that some people are gay. But you know what’s not a ‘fact of life’? That our children need to be shot dead in schools. That’s not a fact of life."

Some news coverage also focused on Vance’s use of the words "fact of life" in his answer.

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid shared an Instagram post with her more than 890,000 followers that showed the words, "School shootings are a fact of life," attributing the quote to Vance. Students "need to risk getting shot at school and suck it up," Reid wrote in the post’s caption.

The Associated Press deleted an X post and updated an article and headline about Vance’s comments. Both originally said, "JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security."

"This post replaces an earlier post that was deleted to add context to the partial quote from Vance," The AP said in a Sept. 5 X post. The new headline: "JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security."

Vance, meanwhile, accused Harris of lying about what he said. And, on Fox News Digital, Vance’s campaign accused the AP of lying, too: "Senator Vance said exactly the opposite of what The Associated Press claimed," spokesperson William Martin said.

Harris has called to ban assault weapons and increase background checks. She also supports red flag laws to reduce gun violence. Harris’ campaign rival and Vance’s running mate, former President Donald Trump, accepted the National Rifle Association’s endorsement in May, and has vowed to roll back gun regulations put in place by Biden.

A reader asked us what Vance said. Here is Vance’s full response to Maher’s question, in context. We have bolded the portions that are relevant to the controversy:

"What happened in Georgia is just an awful tragedy and I know we've got a lot of parents and a lot of grandparents in this room. I mean, I cannot imagine, you know, little kids so excited to go back to school. God love them. And they're at their first week back from the summer and an absolute barbarian decides to open fire and take their lives, and also a couple of teachers. We gotta, we gotta think about these people if you're the praying type, and I know I am, we gotta hold them up in prayer.

"We gotta be hoping for the best for these, for this incredible community because no parent should have to deal with this. No child should have to deal with this. And, yes, after holding these folks up in prayer and giving them our sympathies, because that's what people deserve in a time of tragedy, then we have to think about how to make this less common. 

"Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves, we actually have, have been able to run an experiment on this because you've got some states with very strict gun laws and you've got some states that don't have strict gun laws at all. And the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings and the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings, too. So, clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.

"What is going to solve this problem? And I really do believe this is, look, I, I don't like this. I don't like to admit this. I don't like that this is a fact of life. But if you're, 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 so that a person who walks through the front door … we, we've got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they're not able to.

"And again, as a parent do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course, I don't. I don't want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you've got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.

"And a, and a bunch of my colleagues in the Senate, we actually worked on legislation that would give schools more resources to bolster their security because if these psychos are gonna go after our kids, we've got to be prepared for it.

"We don't have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the, the reality that we live in. We got to deal with it."