Vice presidential candidate/potato JD Vance has a message for all of you pro-gun-control weirdos who think that with some heavy lifting and good old American gumption, we could be a nation where our children don’t have to dodge bullets daily on their way to gym class. And that message is: Suck it up, buttercups.
At a rally in Phoenix on Thursday, Vance called school shootings like the one on Wednesday in Georgia that left two students and two teachers dead “facts of life.” As if these horrible tragedies are something Americans should just roll over and accept. As if these shootings are inevitable, like aging or Thanos:
“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”
Excuse us, but these psychos who are shooting up schools like the one in Georgia are our kids. The shooter on Wednesday was 14. Adults are not wandering into schools with an AR-15 and a host of incoherent grievances. Partly because they are busy wandering into their offices or the nearest Wal-mart with an AR-15 and a host of grievances, but still.
Vance went on:
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance 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. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”
School shootings have only become a regular fact of life in America in the last 25 years. Before that, they were very, very rare. Maybe we could think about why this is so (ASSAULT WEAPONS WERE ILLEGAL, IT IS ALWAYS THE FUCKING GUNS) and address that.
But no, Vance went with the same tired old pabulum we hear from Republicans after every mass shooting. First he yammered on about “lifting up” the Georgia victims with prayer. Then he talked about somehow turning every school in America into a military bunker while ignoring the fact that armed security guards have not deterred school shooters in past massacres, such as at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Florida in 2018.
Video is here if you feel like spiking your blood pressure at the sight of JD Vance’s stupid face:
It is not that Vance is some sort of android lacking human emotions, who Peter Thiel grew in a test tube in his lair beneath a South Pacific volcano. (So far as we know.) It’s just that he wants to win this election and Republican voters really, really, really love guns.
And not that Vance cares, but there were already some security measures in place at Apalachee High School. Automatically locking classroom doors, for instance, which might have saved lives on Wednesday:
The teen suspect left his Algebra 1 class around 9:45 a.m., his classmate Lyela Sayarath told CNN.
The classroom doors lock automatically, and near the end of class, the suspect knocked on the door to try to come back in, Lyela said.
Another student went to open the door but apparently saw the gun and refused to let him in, Lyela said. That diversion may have saved her life.
You know what would have saved the lives of the students the kid at Apalachee did shoot? Not having a gun in the first place!
Speaking of not letting your kids near a gun without supervision, Georgia police on Thursday arrested the father of the Apalachee High shooter and charged him with murder. Why? Because despite the fact that his son had already been investigated for threatening to shoot up his middle school last year, Colin Gray still gifted the kid an AR-15 for Christmas.
Apparently Gray doesn’t watch the news and so didn’t know about the parents in Michigan who were sentenced to prison recently for buying their kid a gun that he then used to shoot up his school. Or he watches the news but thought something along the lines of Surely that will never happen to me, my moody 14-year-old knows better!
Well, he’ll have a decade in a Georgia prison to reconsider! And when he gets out, JD Vance will still suck.
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They've gone from the comforting fiction of "a good guy with a gun" to "Yep, people gonna die, but that's the way it has to be." Not sure the honesty is any kind of argument though.
NEW RULE! Effective immediately:
Mass shootings are now to be referred to as "REPUBLICAN ENDORSED KILLINGS".
Thank you.