The day after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, left a sixth grader dead and seven other people injured, former President Donald Trump said Americans “have to get over” the deadly plague of gun violence.
“It’s a very terrible thing that happened and it’s just terrible,” Trump said at a Sioux Center rally in advance of the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, scheduled for Jan. 15. “To see that happening. That seems terrible. So surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it. We have to move forward. We have to move forward.”
Three other Republican presidential candidates were asked about the shooting at campaign stops, some just a short drive from the school where a 17-year-old junior opened fire as students were returning from winter break.
During Trump’s presidency, there were 23 mass shootings in 2017, 34 in 2018, 31 in 2019, and 45 in 2020, the highest number on record.
Stock market swindler Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an event elsewhere in Perry — a town of 8,000 people — when emergency vehicles began to stream toward the school.
A 17-year-old opened fire with a pump-action shotgun and a small-caliber handgun at a small-town Iowa high school before classes resumed on the first day after the winter break, killing a sixth-grader and wounding five others Thursday as students barricaded in offices, ducked into classrooms and fled in panic.
The suspect, a student at the school in Perry, died of what police claim is a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Authorities said one of the five people wounded was Perry High School Principal Dan Marburger.
Authorities identified the shooter as Dylan Butler, 17, and provided no information about a possible motive, but friends said the killer had been bullied for years.
In a reflection of both the Republican Party’s resistance to any new measures restricting guns and how commonplace incidents like the shooting in Perry have become in American life, the GOP candidates largely stuck to their routines, with none canceling any campaign stops.
At a pair of CNN town halls Thursday night, the first questions to both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley were about guns but both politicians answered by stressing the need for more mental health services and school security then swiftly moved on to other issues.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.