JD Vance’s ‘ridiculous’ debate solution to school shootings leaves people in disbelief

Republican J.D. Vance took aim at critics during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate by suggesting that the solution to school shootings lies partly in making their buildings have stronger doors and windows.

Vance, one opponent of gun control legislation who once called school shootings a “fact of life,” he acknowledged that he does not want his children “to attend school at a school that feels unsafe or where there are visible signs of safety.”

“But unfortunately I think we need to increase security in our schools,” he said.

To do that, Vance suggested, “We need to get the doors closed better. We need to make the doors stronger. We need to make the windows stronger and of course we need to increase the number of school staff. Because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and remove weapons from the hands of bad guys just doesn’t fit with recent experience.

A student at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, told MSNBC during the network’s post-debate analysis that the idea was “ridiculous.”

“The problem is guns, not better locks on doors,” she said in the clip below:

Republicans have a history of claiming doors — or lack of them, really — that can prevent children from being shot or seriously injured in their own classrooms.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in his home after the 2022 Uvalde school massacre that the shooter could have been stopped there had only been “one door to and from the school” with armed police to neutralize the threat.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in 2018 also partly to blame “too many entrances and too many exits” for a massacre at Santa Fe High School, near Houston.

Critics also called out Vance on X, formerly Twitter: