The quote omits crucial context. Lamenting what was then the most recent U.S. school shooting at a Georgia high school, Vance said on Sept. 5, 2024, “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life.”
Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a purported quote about school shootings attributed to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance was shared by his opponents and critics. According to those sources, Vance once called school shootings a "fact of life."
The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris shared the alleged statement via multiple posts on its official X accounts. For example, that campaign wrote, "School shootings are not just a fact of life. It doesn't have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will."
Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said of the purported quote at an LGBTQ+ rights group dinner: "It's a fact of life 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. Folks are banning books, but they're okay with weapons of war being in our schools."
One thing these criticisms have in common is a glaring omission of context. Vance, too, was bemoaning the reality of school shootings with his statement.
During a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, on Sept. 5 — the day after a 14-year-old student opened fire at a Georgia high school, killing four people and injuring at least nine others — Vance said: "I don't like this. I don't like to admit this. I don't like that this is a fact of life."
In the statements by Vance's political opponents, the phrase "fact of life" was correctly attributed to him but removed from context required to understand its intended meaning.
Vance made the remark while responding to a journalist's question, "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?"
His full response is below (emphasis, ours):
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 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'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 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 reality that we live in. We got to deal with it.
The full exchange starts at the 29:17 mark: