‘We’re all sitting ducks’ without more substantial gun control, Warnock says

Americans “are all sitting ducks” unless Congress passes more substantial gun control, US senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday, four days after two students and two teachers at a high school in his home state of Georgia were shot to death, allegedly by a teenager wielding a military-style rifle.

Warnock’s comments Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press came in direct response to statements from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, who had previously said the killings at Appalachee high school in Winder, Georgia, demonstrated how it was a “fact of life” that US schools present “soft targets” to a “psycho [wanting] to make headlines”.

Vance added that US schools therefore must take steps to bolster their security, but such an approach would not eliminate the mass shootings in the US that have occurred in many other types of locales, Warnock – a Democrat – said both on Meet the Press as well as on CNN’s State of the Union.

Of the nearly 390 mass shootings that had been reported in the US so far this year at the time of Warnock’s remarks, three of them were at schools, including the attack at Appalachee, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive and Education Week. Meanwhile, the killings at Appalachee were the only mass murder of 23 reported in the US so far to have happened at a school.

The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded. A mass murder is one in which four or more victims are killed.

Vance “talks about hardening our schools and making them secure – well the reality is this is happening in spas, in shopping malls”, Warnock said on CNN. “It’s happening in houses of worship, in medical clinics.

“What are we going to do? Make the whole country into a fort?”

He told NBC: “We’re all sitting ducks. And any country that allows this to continue without putting forward just common sense safety measures is a country that has – in a tragic way – lost its way.”

Warnock alluded to an April 2023 Fox News poll which reaffirmed that the vast majority of Americans favored strengthening gun safety laws. And he said Congress took an encouraging first step toward treating such public support as a mandate when it enacted bipartisan legislation that expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs.

But what was the first major federal firearms safety bill to pass Congress in nearly three decades was “clearly not enough”, Warnock said, noting how the US continues recording a number of mass shootings that is disproportionate at the global level.

Warnock said polls show most in the US overwhelmingly support universal background checks. Furthermore, Warnock said that large numbers of Americans support banning general access to assault-style rifles and semi-automatic firearms.

Yet federal lawmakers have not been able to get enough votes to clear procedural hurdles preventing Congress from meaningfully consider either issue. Warnock on Sunday blamed that reality on congressmembers who – out of ambition or fear – accept financial support from the wealthy gun industry.

“We are at an impasse because there are people in … politics … who are doing the bidding of the corporatist gun lobby even as they line their pockets with the blood of our children,” Warnock said.

Related: Kamala Harris addresses Georgia school shooting: ‘We’ve got to stop it’

As if on cue, the National Rifle Association (NRA) on Sunday published a clip on its Twitter/X account showing Warnock answering a question about whether Kamala Harris should support a mandatory gun buyback program as she runs for the White House in November against Donald Trump.

Warnock did not say “yes”, instead replying: “We’re not going to be able to get where we need to go without action in Congress. We’ve got to be able to pass some laws to deal with this.” Additionally, he repeatedly told CNN and NBC that he was not proposing to repeal the constitutional US right to bear arms.

The NRA – which remains an influential lobbying group – nonetheless wrote Sunday that Warnock “wants to confiscate millions of guns from law-abiding Americans”.

The shooter suspect at Appalachee faces murder charges over the slayings of two of his fellow 14-year-old students and a pair of mathematics teachers. The accused shooter’s father is also charged with second-degree murder for gifting his son the AR-15-style rifle used in the school attack.

“Fourteen-year-olds don’t need AR-15s,” Warnock said.