Tim Walz Explains Being ‘Friends With School Shooters’ Debate Remark

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told reporters Wednesday that he misspoke during the vice presidential debate when he said that he has “become friends with school shooters.”
Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, made the apparent flub while discussing the issue of gun violence during his first and only debate appearance against Ohio Senator JD Vance, his Republican counterpart, on Tuesday night.
The comment garnered attention online from supporters of Donald Trump, and the former president attacked Walz in several posts to Truth Social as the debate played out, including questioning if the governor “knows what he said.”
But Walz said Wednesday during a stop on his bus tour around Pennsylvania that he was “talking about meeting people where there are school shooters,” and highlighted the relationships he has made victims of mass shootings, including those who survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
“These folks know me. I’m super passionate about this. The question came up about school shooting, [and] we’re talking about everything except school shootings,” Walz said, according to a clip of his exchange with reporters posted to X, formerly Twitter, by NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin.
“I sat as a member of Congress with the Sandy Hook parents, and it was a profound movement,” he continued, adding that gun control activist David Hogg—a student survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018—”is a good friend of mine.”
“You have seen me do this. I was talking about meeting people where there are school shooters, and I need to be more specific on that, but I am…I am passionate about this,” Walz said.
The Trump campaign continued to bash Walz for the gaffe on Wednesday. Vance told supporters at a campaign stop in Auburn Hills, Michigan, that he “actually didn’t notice” Walz’s remarks until discussing the debate with Trump afterward.
“And I said that was probably only the third- or fourth-dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance added.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment on Wednesday.
Walz’s stance on gun control has evolved over the years. While he opposed an assault weapons ban while serving in Congress for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District and was once had high marks from the National Rifle Association (NRA), Walz’s opinions began to shift when he first ran for governor in 2018, after the mass shooting in Parkland.
He now says that he supports an assault weapons ban—as does his running mate, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris—and explained during Tuesday’s debate that his opinions began to change after meeting with mass shooting victims.
“I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters. I’ve seen it,” said Walz, a former public school teacher.
Vance, meanwhile, said at Tuesday’s debate that he favors increasing security in schools in order to combat gun violence, which is the leading cause of death among children in the United States.
“We have to make the doors lock better, we have to make the doors stronger,” Vance said. “We’ve got to make the windows stronger. And, of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers.”
Walz, however, pushed back on Vance’s proposals, asking, “Do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort?”
“We start looking for a scapegoat—sometimes it just is the guns,” Walz said later in his rebuttal.