Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) revived his calls for more gun control on Sunday in the wake of the Georgia high school shooting, saying that AR-15s should be taken “off the streets.”
Warnock said young teenagers should not have access to AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles after 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly used one to carry out a mass shooting inside Apalachee High School, leaving four dead and nine injured.
“Listen, 14-year-olds don’t need AR-15s, and we need to get these military-style weapons off the streets,” Warnock said on Meet the Press.
The Georgia Democrat also lamented that Congress had not passed a bill for universal background checks on firearm purchases, which would expand existing federal background check requirements.
It is unclear whether such a background check would have prevented Gray from using the firearm, which authorities said his father gifted to him.
Gray’s father, Colin Gray, was arrested in connection with the shooting and charged with involuntary manslaughter and child cruelty. Details emerged after the shooting that showed his parents provided an unstable home and that his mother had once been charged with family cruelty and found to be in possession of fentanyl.
Warnock acknowledged there was not “one single law” in particular that would prevent all mass shootings.
“The problem is that we have politicians in our country that are beholden to the gun lobby, and either based on ambition or fear, they go to work every day doing their bidding while the gun lobby lines its pockets with the blood of our children,” Warnock said.
The Georgia Democrat also criticized Sen. J.D. Vance‘s (R-OH) controversial remark on school shootings last week, which he made at a rally in Arizona while campaigning for vice president.
“I don’t like this,” Vance said. “I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life, but 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.”
The Associated Press wrote, and later corrected, a headline that said Vance thought school shootings were a “fact of life.” In its corrected version, the outlet added context to its headline, but not before several other outlets also used the quote in headlines. Democrats elevated it, blasting the remark as egregiously unsympathetic, while Republicans accused the media of mischaracterizing what Vance said.
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NBC host Kristen Welker played the recording from Vance’s rally for Warnock, who in response, echoed Democrats’ criticisms of the Ohio Republican.
“J.D. Vance claims that this kind of random, routine carnage is a ‘fact of life.’ No, it’s not. It’s a fact of American life,” Warnock said, lamenting the high number of school shootings the country has seen.