Trump campaign scrambles to do damage control on Vance’s school shooting comments

Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has been drawing criticism from Democrats in response to comments he made in response to the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, where four people were killed and a suspected 14-year-old shooter is being tried as an adult on murder charges.

At a campaign event in Phoenix on Thursday, September 5, Vance told a reporter, "I don't like that this is a fact of life. 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 so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they're not able to."

Vance's Democratic critics have zeroed in on the "fact of life" part, and the Daily Beast's Sean Craig describes the Trump campaign's efforts at damage control in an article published the morning after that event.

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Vice President Kamala Harris campaign tweeted, "Donald Trump and JD Vance think school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and 'we have to get over it.'"

Trump, after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa back in January, remarked, "It's just horrible. So surprising to see it here, but (we) have to get over it. We have to move forward."

In response to the Harris campaign's tweet, Trump's allies posted, "Kamala's interns just released a statement pushing FAKE NEWS that the Associated Press just retracted. Watch the full video and you'll clearly see that JD Vance does not say what they claim he said."

Craig notes, however, that "the Trump campaign's claim that the Associated Press made a retraction appears to refer to a deleted tweet, not a story."

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"The AP deleted a post on X that said Vance called school shootings a 'fact of life' without mentioning that he was lamenting the situation and replaced it with one with greater detail," according to Craig. "The news agency did not retract its story about Vance's remarks, which was linked in both tweets."

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Read the full Daily Beast article at this link (subscription required).