Question

J.D. Vance said that shootings are a "fact of life."

Answer 1

According to Axios, Vance did say that they are a "fact of life," but it's missing context. He said also: "I don't like that this is a fact of life, but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. 

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/06/georgia-shooting-harris-jd-vance-trump-gun-policy

Comments

Providing the full quote is helpful and it provides more context. Axios is known to have a left-leaning bias in their reporting which could potentially skew perspective but it is hard to find perfectly unbiased news for politics.

Answer 2

I ran the AP photo through "FotoForensics" and "Optic AI or Not" because I could not find the original post on X. I wanted to make sure the X post had not been fabricated. Both sites told me the post was unlikely made from AI. I then combed through the X page of the AP and found this post: 1831870644889514227.

This post explains that the previous post had the headline: “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security.” It was deleted because it needed more context. The AP then posted a new post with this headline: "JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a "fact of life" and says the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia."

Many people have been taking Vance's statement out of context instead of using his whole statement. Vance was asked a question about school shootings during a campaign stop on Sept. 5. His response included this: "What is going to solve this problem? And I really do believe this is, look, I, I don't like this. I don't like to admit this. I don't like that this is a fact of life." I found this on YouTube: watch.

That answer is where people have been pulling his words out of context and saying he said shootings are a "fact of life."

Comments

I love your use of AI and reverse image finders to help support your claim after you could not find the twitter/X post. I also like the fact that you gave context to JD's statement as it gives the reader more information on why he might have said that. Fact checking election claims is extremely important for the future of the country.

---

While you were able to provide more context for the statement, I don't know that it makes what he said much better. His solution was to "bolster security" (0:26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EiA-6QF5eU ) which many schools have already done and are still doing. It still all centers around the issue of keeping people with guns out of schools. If an individual who has a gun wants to use it in/on a building full of children, I think that it's reasonable to say that kind of person should not be allowed to own a gun. Within the first 10 seconds of the clip on YouTube I linked previously from NBC, JD says Kamala's answer to school shootings is to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. Some people obviously don't follow the law, and murder children in mass. Vice President Harris is working to implement ERPO or "red flag laws" which "create a civil process for law enforcement (and often times family members) to seek a judicial order that a person is a danger to themselves or others and should temporarily lose the ability to purchase and possess firearms. The laws have due process protections that ensure people's rights are respected, but also enable a concrete way to intervene." This is from the White House Fact Sheet on Harris' policies on gun violence. I would recommend looking over this. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/23/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-gun-safety-solutions-while-continuing-efforts-to-keep-schools-safe-from-gun-violence/