MSNBC’s Michael Steele got heated and a little personal on Saturday, calling Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance a “weak little man” over his response to the Georgia high school shooting that left four dead.
“Such a weak little man on this issue and a whole lot of them, but that — fact of life?” Steele said after watching Vance’s remarks on MSNBC’s The Weekend.
“That he said he didn’t like,” Symone Sanders-Townsend quickly added.
The Associated Press received backlash over an X post that used the “fact of life” quote without context. AP deleted the post and updated with a new, fuller explanation of Vance’s words.
“JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” read AP’s original post, seen below in a screenshot.
What Vance actually said was he lamented that these types of shootings have become part of daily life, and he pushed for bolstering security in schools to prevent future killings.
Vance said:
Look, 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 are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. 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.
The portion of Vance’s speech that included talk of increased security was played for Steele, but he appeared to have missed it as he accused Vance of presenting no plan and simply chalking up school shootings to a “fact of life.”
Steele said:
Such resignation, such resignation. You’re so weak you can’t even come up with a plan to deal with the killing of children and teachers? I mean, what the hell has happened to Republicans who worship and value the gun more than they do the life of a six-year-old? It makes no sense to me. It’s really — I get the Second Amendment, it ain’t going anywhere. It’s written. It’s on paper. We all got it. But I’m sorry, you just don’t put it above the life of a child. And moms and dads are mourning and a vice presidential candidate, all he’s got to say is it’s a ‘fact of life.’
Watch above via MSNBC.
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