What happened in Georgia is just an awful tragedy and I know we’ve got a lot of parents and a lot of grandparents in this room. I mean, I cannot imagine, you know, little kids so excited to go back to school. God love them. And they’re at their first week back from the summer and an absolute barbarian decides to open fire and take their lives, and also a couple of teachers. We gotta, we gotta think about these people if you’re the praying type, and I know I am, we gotta hold them up in prayer.
We gotta be hoping for the best for these, for this incredible community because no parent should have to deal with this. No child should have to deal with this. And, yes, after holding these folks up in prayer and giving them our sympathies, because that’s what people deserve in a time of tragedy, then we have to think about how to make this less common.
Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves, we actually have, have been able to run an experiment on this because you’ve got some states with very strict gun laws and you’ve got some states that don’t have strict gun laws at all. And the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings and the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings, too. So, clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.
What is going to solve this problem? And I really do believe this is, look, I, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re, 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 that a person who walks through the front door … we, we’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.
And again, as a parent do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course, I don’t. I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.
And a, and a bunch of my colleagues in the Senate, we actually worked on legislation that would give schools more resources to bolster their security because if these psychos are gonna go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it.
We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the, the reality that we live in. We got to deal with it.