“I don’t like to admit this; I don’t like that this is a fact of life.” He then said, “We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through a front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.

But that's still terrible in exactly the same way?

School shootings aren't an ineluctable consequence of the laws of nature. They result from choices we've made as a society.

So Vance is probably correct that school shootings are "a fact of life" if we have a country where private ownership of firearms is protected under the Second Amendment as recently construed by the Supreme Court. If you stipulate that regulatory environment and freedom of ownership with minimal restrictions, then it probably is unavoidable that school kids will get shot up.

But....that's the point? That it's wrong to continue to insist that we maintain that level of minimally restricted gun ownership if the consequence is having kids subject to being massacred at school? That it's terrible to (metaphorically) throw up one's hands and accept it as a fact of life, rather than being outraged enough to question and change the underlying conditions that allow this to happen? It's not a "fact of life." It's a consequence of our choices.

There's a reason why the ironic Onion headline reads "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" after every shooting. It's because there is a way to prevent this. We just choose not to. Countries like Japan or the UK don't have school shootings like this, despite having large populations that will unavoidably include young people with mental health issues.

You can make an argument that this is the right choice. We constantly accept peril in order to have freedom. We don't stop driving, even though "it's a fact of life" that having lots of driving will result in avoidable deaths. But if you make that argument, it's completely appropriate for people to criticize you based on their different priorities - and to especially criticize you for speaking as if these events aren't something we could do something about, but choose not to.