Walz says his son witnessed a shooting, drawing sympathy from Vance : NPR

This story first appeared in the NPR Network’s live blog of the 2024 vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. For the latest on the campaign, head to NPR’s Elections page.

Gov. Tim Walz told Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that his son Gus witnessed a shooting, an admission that visibly surprised and saddened his opponent, JD Vance, onstage.

“I’ve got a 17-year-old and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball,” Walz said.

“That’s awful,” Vance murmured, shaking his head.

Video credit: CBS News Vice Presidential Debate.

Both candidates condemned the epidemic of school shootings — and said they know they agree on that — but offered different solutions for addressing it. Vance talked about improving physical security measures while Walz focused on gun control legislation.

When it was Vance’s turn to respond, he addressed Walz directly.

“Tim, first of all, I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting, and I’m sorry about that and I hope he’s doing OK,” he said. “Christ have mercy, it is awful.”

“I appreciate you saying that,” Walz replied.

Walz told MPR News in March about the incident, which happened at the Jimmy Lee Community Center in Saint Paul.

“As a parent of a youth who was at that facility, I think that would have been a good decision to keep those firearms out of there,” he said.

As the candidates shared a moment on empathy on stage about school shootings, Trump went on the attack on Truth Social, posting an apparent slip from Walz where he said he had “become friends with school shooters” in one of his answers. (Asked later by reporters to clarify, Walz did not respond.)

At other moments in the debate, the views between the two notably diverged.

In a question about whether prosecutors should charge parents for the mass shootings their children commit, Vance turned quickly to how to prevent school shootings in general. In his view, the primary way to prevent these shootings is to increase school security.

“Unfortunately, I think that we have to increase security in our schools,” Vance said. “We have to make the door stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger and of course we’ve got to increase school resource officers.”

Vance was essentially suggesting a common response to school shootings: That schools need to become hardened, by adding things like metal detectors and more police presence.

However, many experts say a more effective approach is to focus more on buttressing the emotional well-being of students and making sure that they feel like they belong, as school shooters often have been bullied.

Walz, for his part, turned quickly to gun control legislation.

“I think what we end up doing is we start looking for a scapegoat. Sometimes it just is the guns,” he said.

Vance and Walz are both gun owners, but that’s largely where their similarities on guns end. Vance, who has been applauded by the NRA, has called reforms like expanding background checks a “gimmick,” and bans on bump stocks, which allow a gun to fire nearly at machine gun speed, a “huge distraction.”

Walz has signed gun control laws as governor in Minnesota, including a red-flag law and another bill that strengthened the punishment for giving guns to people who can’t legally possess them.

There is evidence that gun control laws, particularly red-flag laws, work. Researchers at the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, found that suicides, which account for the majority of gun deaths, decrease when red-flags are issued.

Conversely, research shows that laws that loosen gun restrictions, like right-to-carry laws, appear to result in more violent crimes involving firearms, more firearm assaults, more workplace homicides and more police shootings.

Watch NPR’s post-debate analysis, with Asma Khalid, Susan Davis, Tamara Keith and Stephen Fowler.