(The Center Square) – During the Tuesday debate between candidates for vice president, the two sparred over school shootings, illustrating the ideological divide between the main political parties.
While Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance from Ohio and Democratic candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz maintained a generally civil tone during the portion of the debate, their answers highlight the wide divide on approaches to school safety.
When pressed during the debate hosted by CBS News, Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, and Vance, the Republican one, took opposite approaches on how to curb shooting deaths that generally reflected their party’s stances.
When asked by CBS News moderators about whether he supported charging parents for the crimes of their children regarding school shootings, like in the Oxford, Michigan, school shooting case, Vance said that it would depend on the case and that law enforcement would determine the appropriate approach.
Vance said that he and Walz would likely agree that “we need to do better.” But Vance said many of the weapons responsible for gun violence are illegal and are transported via drug cartels.
Instead, Vance said we should be tightening security at schools.
“What do we do to protect our kids? I think the answer is, and I say this not loving the answer, because I don’t want my kids 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,” Vance said.
“We have to make the doors lock better, we have to make the doors stronger, we’ve got 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,” Vance said. “We’ve got to make our schools safer, and we’ve got to have some commonsense, bipartisan solutions for how to do that.”
Walz said that a school shooting is every parent’s worst nightmare and that he’s met with the families of school shooting victims.
“I’m a hunter. The vice president is,” Walz said. “We understand that the Second Amendment is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out. In Minnesota, we enacted enhanced red flag laws, enhanced background checks, and we can start to get data.”
Walz said that the discussion was good beginning, but that Vance’s approach is not “far enough” when there are “things that work.”
Walz said that he had spent time in Finland and despite the high gun ownership rate there, they don’t experience the same rate of school shootings.
Walz maintained there are “things we can do” that are “not infringing on your Second Amendment” rights, that viewers can keep their guns and that “there are things we can do that can make a difference” and that “we have to.” He also asked viewers if they want their schools to “look like a fort.”
Vance replied that Finland is a great example of the “weird differences” between our country’s gun problem and those of other cuntries. Vance said the U.S. has higher rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse.
“We unfortunately have a mental health crisis in this country, that I do think we need to get to the root causes of, because I don’t think it’s the whole reason why we have such a bad gun violence problem, but I do think it is a big piece of it,” Vance said.
Vance also said gun violence in big cities is to blame and said police should be empowered to remove offenders.
The moderators asked Walz about why he changed his position on a bill to ban assault weapons, which he now supports but previously opposed.
“I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents,” Walz replied. He added that he used to be an “NRA guy” and would keep his shotgun in his car to go pheasant hunting after practice, but “that’s not where we are today.”
Walz pushed back on Vance’s blame on mental health issues and said that “just because you have a mental health issue, doesn’t mean you’re violent.”
“I think what we end up doing is we start looking for a scapegoat, sometimes it just is the guns. It’s just the guns. And there are things that you can do about it,” Walz said.
• This story initially published at Chalkboard News, a K-12 news site that, like The Center Square, is also published by Franklin News Foundation.
