I’m typically desensitized to things like this, but when I saw J.D. Vance’s comments in the wake of the most recent school shooting in Georgia— in which he lamented that these have become a “fact of life”— my response was “yes, finally, someone came out and just admitted it.” I think this speech reveals a lot about where we are today. 

I’m not going to attack Vance for this quote or try to take it out of context. To be clear, when you listen to the whole thing, he’s obviously not just throwing his hands up and saying we have to accept this. 

Which is surprising to me, because that’s what the strategy has been for the last two decades. 

When discussing political issues in a journalistic context, in the interest of being unbiased, it’s best practice to reference “the government,” “politicians,” and other vague boogeymen. This is not possible here, as the current state of gun violence in America is squarely the fault of the Republican party and their supporters.

And I want to talk about that latter group for a second. Again, it’s not typically appropriate to pick on the little guy, so to speak. We try to serve the interests of the public and tend to punch up. But in this case, normal, everyday citizens are enablers and often active participants in the problem. 

Further in the speech, Vance said that “Kamala Harris’ answer is to take guns away from law-abiding citizens.” I’m not going to bother to dispute this, because that’s exactly what should happen. 

There’s almost this wild west myth of the American gun owner, that of a calm, stalwart defender, “who only uses this vile machinery to protect his family and his homestead.” This is not true. People buy guns to shoot each other with them. They turn otherwise manageable social friction into games of Russian roulette. If you’re living with physical abuse, that’s a problem that someone is trained to handle, with a possible happy ending. If there’s a gun in the home, someone is going to die. If you and I exchange words in a bar and end up fighting, we will likely walk away with bruised faces and egos. If one of us has a gun, then one of us is going to get shot. 

These are not hypotheticals, we see this happen constantly. Guns are a force amplifier, and introducing them into any situation makes it far more dangerous. It’s self-evident that guns are the problem, but this is also supported by every available data point. It is crystal clear that the American public can not be trusted with them, and they ought to be removed from our civil ecosystem. 

The common counter to this is that “criminals will always find a way to get guns. People think of “criminals” as some separate category of human instead of “a person who commits crimes.” Every gun owner is a law-abiding citizen until they break the law, at which point it’s too late. 

And guns aren’t drugs. They’re not made in a lab or grown from the ground. They’re not sold by shady men in trench coats on street corners. An illegal gun has almost always been legal at one point and has either had its serial number sawed off, been modified in some way, improperly transferred to another person, or simply lost, and fallen into the hands of someone else. And this doesn’t even mention the frequency of people being shot in incidents that aren’t crimes, such as suicides, police violence, and accidental shootings. 

Objectively, the risk of being a victim of a mass shooting is remote, but I don’t think people distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable risks. When I get into my car to drive to work every day, there’s a .00 whatever percent chance that I’ll die in some awful crash. But, if I pay attention, follow traffic laws, and drive a car with modern safety features, that probably isn’t going to happen. I’m okay with taking that risk. 

Now, when I drop my child off at kindergarten, if there’s a non-zero chance that they will be shot and killed— and nobody is willing or able to do anything about it— that’s not a risk that anyone would take. 

I want to drill down on this metaphor. If I get on a plane, I’m okay with the risk of the plane crashing. I’m not okay with the plane being attacked by aliens. If I ride a bike without a helmet, I’ve accepted that I might fall and hit my head. I am not prepared for suddenly being hit with an atomic bomb. These situations are only slightly more absurd than the reality: the real chance that any public gathering will be turned into a warzone at any given moment. A specific type of gun is to blame for this. 

The term “assault rifle” is seen as a misnomer, people claim that you can call any gun an “assault” weapon. But while “assault rifle” is not a technically correct term, it is an entirely appropriate label. These guns are designed for offense, to kill people as efficiently and quickly as possible. They are not used for hunting or self-defense. They are modeled to resemble and function like military-grade rifles. And they are capable of doing almost supernatural damage to the human body— the scene at Uvalde was so grizzly that some bodies could not be identified. There’s a reason they’ve become the weapon of choice for almost every mass shooter in recent memory. 

Vance and his ilk are aware of all of this, and they’ve decided they’re okay with it. Of course, nobody wants more dead kids like some sort of cackling supervillain. But they have looked at the situation, understood the terms of the bargain, and have decided that it’s a fair deal. Vance’s speech also floats band-aid solutions like metal detectors and such, but this always feels like they’re going through the motions, and actively refuse to solve the real issue. In order to preserve our right to collect an expensive hobbyist item, once every few months, someone will walk into a public space and kill several people, and that’s an acceptable price. Mass shootings are not an intentional goal, but are an acceptable byproduct of their political project. 

They made this clear years ago. This feels absurd to type, because if we’re being objective, these two events were nowhere near the same level of severity, but for all intents and purposes, the Parkland shooting was Gen Z’s 9/11. It happened when I was a junior in high school, and for at least a month after, there was a palpable fear in the air every second we were in that building. Every fire alarm or random loud bang in the hallway made us wonder if “this is it.” It turned us into mini activists, staging walkouts and writing speeches. Before Parkland, I cared very little about politics, but the shooting turned me into a shrieking, gun-grabbing Liberal caricature. No other event has shaped my political and personal beliefs as much as this one. So the fact that this has all become routine will never sit right with me.

For comments/questions about this story DM us on Instagram @thewhitatrowan or email opinion@thewhitonline.com