Two of the top 2024 Republican presidential candidates are calling for more law enforcement in schools after a deadly shooting at a school in Tennessee.
“The real question is why this criminal was able to get into that school in Nashville in the first place. Right?” Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the candidates, said in a video statement. “We protect our banks, green pieces of paper sitting in the bank account, more effectively than we protect our kids in schools.”
Ramaswamy has proposed the abolishment of the U.S. Department of Education, arguing it is ineffective.
With just a quarter of the department’s budget, “we could have 2-3 armed marshals in every public school in America—to ensure something like this never happens again,” Ramaswamy wrote in a Facebook post on March 27 after the shooting occurred.
At a town hall in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley, the other candidate, also spurned calls from President Joe Biden and others to ramp up gun ownership restrictions.
“You’re going to hear everybody want to talk about gun control,” Haley said. “My thing is, I don’t want to take away your ability to protect yourself until they do those things that protect those kids and we need to make sure that happens in every school because it’s happened too often and we need to make sure that stops.”
Haley said schools should have a single point of entry and always have a law enforcement officer on campus. She also suggested metal detectors, used in some schools already, should be expanded.
Former President Donald Trump, the third major declared GOP 2024 candidate, has not appeared to comment on the shooting, and his campaign did not return a query.
The shooting took place at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville. Three children and three adults were killed, officials said. The shooter was named as Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old biological woman who identified as male. Two police officers fatally wounded Hale, video footage showed.
Ramaswamy said he believes gender dysphoria, or a person believing they are a sex different from the one they’re born as, should be treated as a mental health condition.
“When someone identifies as a gender different from their biological sex, more often than not, that is a sign and a symptom that they are suffering from a mental illness,” Ramaswamy, a business executive, said in a statement.
“I reject the idea that it is somehow ‘humane’ to affirm their confusion, rather than to actually help them. It’s inhumane,” he added.
The World Health Organization and other organizations used to classify gender dysphoria as a mental disorder, but many have stopped using that classification in recent years.
Social media profiles associated with Hale show the woman identified using “he/him” pronouns. Hale described herself as a freelance graphic designer and artist who liked “binging on video games, watching movies, and playing sports.”
Police officials said they’re investigating whether that identity motivated the shooter to act. A manifesto has been obtained, but not released to the public as of yet.
Biden, at an event at the White House on Monday, praised the police officers who confronted Hale and said officials “have to do more to stop gun violence.”
“It’s ripping our communities apart and ripping at the soul of the nation and we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons,” the Democrat president said. “The shooter in this situation reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol, two AK-47s. So I call on Congress, again, to pass my assault weapons ban.”
Biden’s proposed ban would outlaw a number of semiautomatic weapons. Critics say the ban would be an overreach and cover guns commonly used by millions of Americans.
Nashville officials said Hale was armed with “assault-type rifles” and a handgun. More specific details on the firearms have not been made public as of yet.
Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “We need to do something. Once again, the president calls on Congress to do something before another child is senselessly killed in a preventable act of gun violence.”
Ramaswamy said in one of his statements that adding officers would help protect children.
“I refuse to just stand by as some bystander watching this and accepting it like it has to be so and then spouting off irrelevant topics like an assault weapons ban,” he said. “We have the same number of guns in this country today as we did 50 years ago. The thing that’s actually different is a lot of the mental health issues that have changed since then.”
Jack Phillips contributed to this report.