JD Vance’s ‘Ridiculous’ Debate Solution To School Shootings Has People In Disbelief

Republican JD Vance floored critics with his suggestion during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate that the solution to school shootings lies, in part, with their buildings having stronger doors and windows.

Vance, an opponent of gun control legislation who once called school shootings a “fact of life,” acknowledged he doesn’t want his children “to go to school in a school that feels unsafe or where there are visible signs of security.”

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

To do that, Vance proposed: “We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger. We have to make the windows stronger and, of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers. Because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it 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 issue is guns, not better locks on doors,” she said in the clip below:

Republicans have a history of claiming doors ― or, actually, a lack of them ― could prevent children from being shot dead or seriously wounded in their own classrooms.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said following the 2022 Uvalde school massacre in his home state that the gunman could have been stopped had there just been “one door into and out of the school” with armed police there to neutralize the threat.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in 2018 similarly partly blamed “too many entrances and too many exits” for a massacre at Santa Fe High School, near Houston.

Critics called out Vance on X, formerly Twitter, too: