Earlier this month, the Associated Press claimed that Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), the running mate for former and potentially future President Donald Trump, said school shootings were a "fact of life." In reality, Vance said "I don't like that this is a fact of life" and was focusing on not making schools out to be soft targets. The AP had to delete their post, but the damage was done, especially as the Harris-Walz ticket repeated the lie. During Thursday's House Oversight Committee hearing about the failures of the Biden-Harris administration, Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) repeated the line as well when talking about gun violence.
Before misquoting Vance in such a manner, Raskin also brought up the first assassination attempt against Trump, which took place on July 13, in a way that appeared to downplay the severity by bringing up other shootings. He also took it as a chance to go after Republicans. "Don't all Americans deserve to live free from gun violence," he asked.
Raskin then brought up statistics, including how "there were four Americans who died that day, on July 13, after the attack in Butler." That's when the ranking member brought up Vance. "And yet we're told by JD Vance that gun violence is a quote 'fact of life in America,'" Raskin continued, making air quotes with his fingers.
"C'est la vie, nothing can be done about it. Of course it's not 'a fact of life' in England, or France, or Ireland, or Canada, or Japan, or dozens of other countries," he continued to rant, leaving out how in this country we have the Second Amendment. Raskin then predictably went after the NRA, the Republican Party, "and the terribly weak Swiss cheese gun laws they insist upon," which he claimed "have made gun violence a fact of death in America," as he then promoted his views on gun control laws.
During Thursday’s @GOPoversight hearing, Ranking Member Jamie Raskin brought up the false narrative that @JDVance claimed school shootings are “a fact of life” as part of the ranking member’s rant on gun control. Check out my latest for @townhallcom! https://t.co/RUPswnJP3X pic.twitter.com/4pE1l7LGq3
— Rebecca Downs🇺🇸🟦🇮🇱 (@RebeccaRoseGold) September 20, 2024
While Raskin got so much out of that one false line, the full context of Vance's remarks tells a much different story. "I don't like that this is a fact of life," Vance had actually 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," he continued as part of his remarks not long after a tragic shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia resulted in four dead.
This would hardly be the only misleading narrative that Raskin got into with his opening statements and throughout the hearing, though. He and many other Democrats on the Committee insisted on lying about Project 2025. Such a project is an initiative of the Heritage Foundation and is not, no matter how many times Democrats desperately claim, a project from Trump. The Republican nominee has even criticized many parts of the plan, and Democrats who falsely try to tie Trump to the initiative have been fact-checked.