MJNNEAPOLIS — Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance met privately for two hours with parents of the two children killed in the attack at Annunciation Catholic school last week. They laid flowers at the church. Vance spoke on the phone with hospitalized Weston Halsne, a 10-year-old student who took a bullet fragment in his back. The vice president reported that the boy was “full of life, happy, recovering well.” Before flying back to Washington, Vance told news reporters: “All of us — Democrat, Republican, independent — want these school shootings to happen less frequently. Hopefully there’s some steps that we can take to make that happen.” His statement seemed to be backing off his record on mass shootings, which has been to blame a “mental health crisis” as the root cause. He has stridently opposed stricter gun controls. In running for the U.S. Senate in 2022, Vance sought the National Rifle Association’s endorsement by campaigning that addressing mental health issues would be more effective than gun control legislation. Asked about Governor Tim Walz’s call for stricter gun control, Vance said: “Look, I’m not going to tell the Minnesota lawmakers or the governor exactly how they should respond to this tragedy.”
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Usha and JD Vance. Emerging from their bulletproof chauffeured government limousine to lay flowers at a memorial outside the mass shooting site at Annunciation Church.