Warnock responds to JD Vance’s comments on Georgia shooting: Guns make us all ‘sitting ducks’

One of Georgia’s senators has responded to Republican vice presidential contender JD Vance after he referred to school shootings as a regrettable “fact of life” in modern society.

Raphael Warnock, who won a six-year term in 2022 after defeating a Republican challenger to secure his first full term in office, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday after a shooting in his state claimed the lives of two students and two teachers at a high school. Nine others were injured.

He was asked about the comments by Vance, which ignited a media firestorm and were seized upon by Kamala Harris’s campaign as the latest sign of Republicans’ refusal to address such horrific attacks in American schools. The Ohio senator, speaking at a rally in Arizona, lamented, “I don’t like that this is a fact of life” after the shooting took place last week.

“Listen, JD Vance claims that this random, routine carnage is a ‘fact of life’. No, it’s not. This is a fact of American life,” Warnock stressed to NBC’s Kristen Welker.

He added: “There are children that are troubled in other countries. This only happens here. It’s the guns.”

“In America, it’s not safe to be in our schools, it’s not safe to be in our shopping malls. … We’re all sitting ducks.”

Warnock is correct; the US experiences shooting incidents in schools at a number that is unmatched by any other country in the developed world. Homicide, with gun violence making up the lion’s share, is the second-leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 30.

Political debate in America after a mass shooting typically revolves around the roles of firearms in American society and whether the prevalence and availability of guns contribute to the US’s higher rates of gun violence compared to other developed nations.

Warnock, who represents a purple state in the deep south, took the position Sunday that no individual piece of gun control legislation would have stopped the Apalachee High School shooting while pointing to the overall number of guns in America as a reason for the higher rates of violence.

“A country that allows this to continue, without putting forth just common-sense gun safety measures, is a country that has in a tragic way lost its way.”

Warnock’s victory in 2022 (as well as sweeping victories for him and other Democrats just two years earlier) has emboldened Democrats pushing to turn Georgia into the first real crack in the red wall of the American South. The state is a top battleground for the 2024 election and hosted the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in June before the latter dropped out of the race.

The shooting in Georgia’s Barrow County came after the 14-year-old suspect was reportedly gifted an AR-15-style rifle by his father despite a known history of suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Both the suspected shooter, Colt Gray, and his father remain in police custody following the attack.