JD Vance has responded to this week’s Georgia school shooting, telling supporters Thursday at a rally in Phoenix: “If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it. We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality that we live in. We gotta deal with it.” Asked what could be done to stop these horrific events, the Ohio senator claimed restricting access to guns is not the solution. “I don’t like this, I don’t like to admit this, I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” he said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door…we’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to. And, again, as a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security, but that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”
After Vance made his remarks, the Associated Press wrote them up and headlined its story: “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security.” That is, of course, exactly what he said, but perhaps having the opportunity to hear how bad it sounded, the Vance campaign immediately claimed “fake news.”
Complaining that the AP flat-out lied about the VP hopeful’s comments, a spokesperson told Fox News: “This is yet another case of the fake news media brazenly lying about a Republican politician. Senator Vance said exactly the opposite of what the Associated Press claimed. It should come as no surprise that the AP lost any and all credibility it had years ago, because they will lie about literally anything in order prop up the Democrats. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has called for all police officers to be removed from schools, putting children all over America at risk. It’s yet another example of how Kamala Harris’s weak, failed, and dangerously liberal agenda makes her unfit for office.”
In reality, the AP did not actually lie, and, as even Fox News noted in its story, the outlet reported Vance’s quote accurately. Seemingly attempting to throw the Vance team a bone, the Fox article then offered that the AP “appeared to insinuate Vance called school shootings a ‘fact of life’ in a callous or dismissive way.” Given that Vance literally said school shootings are a “fact of life”and then called for stronger security, “appeared to insinuate” is doing an incredible amount of work here. Nevertheless, the AP replaced its original headline and reshared the story on X with the added context that Vance laments that school shootings have become a fact of life.
Of course, the real problem here is not the context in which Vance noted that school shootings have become disturbingly commonplace in the United States, and it’s fully believable that he isn’t happy about these horrific events. The issue is that he, like his fellow Republicans, is not willing to do the things that might actually stop them, which is further restricting gun access. As New York magazine notes:
As for bolstered security in American schools to deter school shootings, only asmall number of attackshave been warded off by a security officer. Astudypublished in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2021 found that there was no significant reduction in injuries when there was an armed guard during a shooting, and that school shootings involving an armed guard averaged three times more people killed. As the families of victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the Robb Elementary Schoolcanattest, police and security officers also need to act in the moment.
Meanwhile, in countries with strict gun laws, mass shootings are, somehow, not an unfortunate “fact of life.”
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