Senator JD Vance is far from the left's or the media's – but I repeat myself here – favorite person.
I get that, and while it's grotesque how biased the media is about the whole matter, people have opinions and a right to them. However, they're not entitled to lie about what someone said without being challenged, and this they've done with Vance ever since the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
At the time, Vance called shooting an unfortunate "fact of life" and talked about how gun control isn't a solution, so we should talk more about school security. Nothing he said was overly controversial except, perhaps, arguing that maniacs are going to do horrible things no matter what laws you put in place. That shouldn't be controversial, but it is in this day and age.
Yet, the left has latched onto the "fact of life" aspect.
Despite it being debunked, they keep repeating it:
In 2022, 48,204 people died by firearms in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 21 of those lives were taken at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, only hours away from Waco. Just three weeks ago, in Georgia, four more students were killed at Apalachee High School.
And while victims of these random acts of gun violence are afforded a little more than “thoughts and prayers,” politically-motivated shootings and assassination attempts are given a higher profile in this country as those from across the aisle race to rightfully denounce them while simultaneously sending lukewarm messaging about school shootings.
Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance lauded former President Donald Trump’s continuing to golf after a second shooting attempt as “courage under fire,” while he brushed off the shooting in Georgia as a sad, unfortunate “fact of life.”
This is in a piece titled, in part, "Selective Outrage Must End."
The irony is thick.
They keep lying about how Vance approached the shooting. In this case, they say "he brushed off the shooting" when he did no such thing. This is a blatant lie. Whether they're intentionally lying or simply repeating the lie they heard from someone else is irrelevant for anyone who is at least pretending to be a journalist. They should have at least looked at his comments before opining on them.
But if they lie about something so easily proven false, what else will they lie about, especially regarding mass shootings, gun violence, and so on?
For example, they fail to note that nearly two-thirds of the 48,000 people mentioned in their first paragraph die from suicide, which isn't something you're going to curtail via gun control. They know that. They just hope the readers don't know this.
Vance's comments align very closely with the "very fine people" hoax the media loves to perpetuate and did until it had a life of its own. Like Trump's out-of-context remarks, they omit the parts where either man says something that makes a sensible comment and shows that neither is an unhinged lunatic.
It also aligns with the myth that guns are killing more children than car accidents, while expressly including legal adults and omitting children under the age of one. That's a lie the media continues to perpetuate.
Or how about any use of the Gun Violence Archive's (GVA) mass shooting numbers? GVA routinely overcounts these incidents all in an effort to push gun control. We know this is where the leadership of that site stands, yet the media never reports on that.
The media has lost the trust of the American people because they're untrustworthy. They'll continue to perpetuate lie after lie. This one with Vance is just one recent example.
Remember, no matter how much you hate the media, it really isn't enough.