Vice President JD Vance was heckled as he visited the site of last week’s deadly school shooting in Minneapolis to meet with the victims’ families.
Dozens of protestors on Wednesday lined the streets near the Annunciation Catholic Church, the site where a week ago, suspect Robin Westman shot dead an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old in the pews, and left 21 others injured as school children celebrated Mass
Upon arriving at the Church alongside Second Lady Usher Vance, the vice president, a Catholic convert, was greeted by a large group of parents and residents brandishing signs calling for bans on assault weapons and placing “kids lives over guns.”
“Protect our kids,” one woman yelled in a video posted on X. “Do better!,” another joined in.
“You’re a coward,” a third woman shouted before Vance’s Secret Service detail shrouded the view to the entrance of the school.
Another video shared by Minneapolis-based FOX 9 showed a man with a megaphone chanting that the National Rifle Association has “got to go,” while waving a rainbow-colored paper fan.
The crowd, some of whom were holding up signs saying, “Hate Won’t Make America Great,” erupted into shrieks and jeers as Vance’s motorcade sped past.
“Get out of my city,” one man bellowed, while the man with the megaphone yelled: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Holding a sign that said it was Vance’s job to “protect our kids,” Kacie Sharpe told the news station that her son lost his best friend, Fletcher Merkel, 10, after bullets rained through the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church.
“This is a political problem, like something has to be done,” she said. “My son lost his best friend in the world because these politicians won’t do anything.”
After the frosty reception, the Vances held a private, 45-minute-long meeting with victims’ family members, the pastor of the parish and the school principal, according to his office.
The vice president and his wife laid bouquets at a memorial outside the church before visiting Lydia Kaiser, a 12-year-old shooting victim, at the Children’s Minnesota hospital.
“We disagree about so many things,” her father, Harry Kaiser, a gym teacher at the school, read from a letter to Vance. “But on just this one issue of gun violence, will you please promise me — as a father and a Catholic — that you will earnestly support the study of what is wrong with our culture.
“That we are the country that has the worst mass shooter problem?,” he added.
Vance told reporters that he took parents’ concerns seriously and that politicians on both sides of the aisle want school shootings to happen less frequently.
“I have never had a day that will stay with me like this day did,” he said.
“I would just say, take the concerns of these parents seriously,” Vance later told reporters. “I think all of us, Democrat, Republican and independent, want these school shootings to happen less frequently. Hopefully there’s some steps that we can take to make that happen.”
