JD Vance Cowardly Dodges Gun Control Question With Terrible Joke

There have been at least 50 school shootings across the United States in 2024, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. But the Republican presidential ticket doesn’t seem to have any solutions for preventing future violence.

Instead, JD Vance transparently dodged a direct question Tuesday from a reporter with The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan campus newspaper, on the sensitive topic, choosing instead to ramble extensively about paltry school rivalries.

“Why should students in Michigan cast their vote for the Trump-Vance ticket, and additionally, how will your administration support students specifically concerning gun violence when you have rejected calls for tougher gun laws and bans on bump stocks?” the student reporter asked, to jeering and booing from the MAGA crowd. “Essentially, why should students concerned about their safety on campus vote for you?”

It quickly became clear that Vance had no intention of actually answering the question.

“First, let’s be honest here, I don’t know if an Ohio State graduate is the best messenger to University of Michigan students,” Vance said to cheers. “In fact—maybe, we should just get a clip of me saying something nice about Kamala Harris out to the University of Michigan because maybe then they’d all vote for Donald J. Trump if you just told them I was a Buckeye.

“I’m always a little nervous about injecting myself into the OSU-Michigan rivalry,” he continued, still skirting any mention of taking legitimate action to halt the senseless violence.

“All kidding aside, look, we all care about the country,” Vance said. “And that’s why I  think every person in this room is going to help me make Donald J. Trump the next president of the United States.”

Vance then attempted to lure in listening students with promises of creating more jobs in their hometowns and vaguely addressing the housing crisis—though that baseless future wouldn’t help their situation if they found themselves in the crossfire of another shooting.

Minutes later, Vance actually did have some words to share about the topic at hand.

“What I have said is that upwards of 90 percent of the gun crime that’s committed in this country is committed using an illegally obtained firearm,” Vance said.

In reality, a 2023 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, found that the vast majority of guns used in crimes—roughly 99 percent—were purchased legally from a dealer, pawnbroker, or direct from a gun manufacturer, even if they were stolen and used in crimes later.

Vance has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, which spent nearly half a million dollars in Ohio to help elect him to his Senate seat in 2022. The MAGA Republican has also promised to abolish the ATF, which oversees the $9 billion gun industry.

Ultimately, according to Vance, the “best way to reduce gun crime” has nothing to do with limiting the amount of weapons in the country, no matter how destructive or army-ready they are. Instead, the obvious solution is the retroactive one: to “lock up people who are committing violence against their fellow citizens.”

“That’s the most important thing,” Vance told the jubilant crowd.

For all his talk of being a family man, JD Vance went out of his way Tuesday to put a target on the backs of children during a speech in Detroit, Michigan. But they’re the children of immigrants, so why would he care? 

Vance was speaking about undocumented immigrants when he turned his attention specifically to school-age children. 

“The other thing that is crazy about the border, is that in the state of Michigan—I didn’t know this statistic until today—there are 85,000 students in Michigan public schools who are the children of illegal aliens,” Vance claimed.

“Eighty-five thousand. Now think about that. Think about what it does to a poor school teacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English,” Vance said. “Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Here, Vance seems to have widened his net beyond targeting undocumented immigrant children, a plainly heinous rhetorical step in itself, to children who may very well be U.S. citizens by nature of being born here. It’s also worth noting that Vance has a penchant to falsely describe immigrants with protected legal status as “illegal,” so it’s unclear whom exactly he would include in this statistic. 

While it’s also unclear where Vance got “85,000” children from, the number does appear on the Higher Education Immigration Portal, which states that there are 85,000 second-generation immigrant students attending higher education institutions in Michigan. 

If this is in fact the number Vance is using, it’s worth noting that it has absolutely no relationship with U.S. public schools, school-aged children, or even undocumented immigrants. “Second-generation immigrants” refers to people born in the U.S. While Vance’s claim was specifically about the parents, there is no data that supports the claim that all of these students’ parents are undocumented.

In that same vein, it’s likely that these second-generation students would not struggle with English language proficiency. Way to go, Vance! That’s 0 for 4!

But let’s for a moment imagine that the number Vance gave was somehow correct. Even then, his alleged grievances start to fall apart. 

In 2022, 1,433,914 students were enrolled in Michigan public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means that Vance is claiming that roughly five percent of all students in the state are such a gross drain on resources that it has somehow diminished the quality of education for the other 95 percent. Perhaps Vance is right to be concerned about the waning quality of American education. 

Vance’s blatant scapegoating makes no sense because it is not built on real concerns about the quality of education, or the “poor” teachers who might struggle to meet the needs of the classroom because of a lack of education funding. Rather, his claim is built on making racist distinctions between who “deserves” to have access to education and who should be kicked out as a cheap shot for votes in a battleground state.

“Look, I think we’re a great country, we can be compassionate, and we ought to be compassionate, but our compassion has to start with our fellow citizens, the people that deserve to be in the United States to begin with,” Vance said. 

The Ohio senator touted Donald Trump’s plan for the largest mass deportations in the history of the United States as “the best way to be compassionate.”

Vance has previously invoked compassion as a quasi-religious justification for the blatantly bigoted immigration policies. Neither of Vance’s rhetorical lines are particularly new for the Trump campaign, which has repeatedly stressed the strain influxes of immigration can have on schools. But this goes to show how the Republican ticket has normalized rhetoric that targets the most vulnerable in our society.

Last month, Trump made a similar comment about non-English speaking students in schools in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which was promptly debunked by the Charleroi school district superintendent. In fact, reimbursement from the Department of Education had actually increased as student enrollment increased—the very same Department of Education Trump hopes to dismantle.

Vance’s reckless targeting of school-age children and teenagers also happens to be in a state with the largest populations of Palestinian and Lebanese immigrants. Michigan has the second largest population of Arab immigrants in the U.S., and the highest with the highest percentage population in the country, according to the Arab American Institute.  

This story has been updated.

During Kamala Harris’s Tuesday appearance on The View, the vice president was asked what her biggest difference with President Joe Biden is—and she gave a surprising answer: She plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet.

Harris initially said that “not a thing comes to mind” that she would have done anything differently than Biden. But then she went on to elaborate.

“Listen, I plan on having a Republican in my Cabinet,” Harris elaborated. “You ask me what’s the difference between Joe Biden and me, well that will be one of the differences.”

Then, she appeared to take a jab at Biden, adding, “I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.”

But not everyone thinks appointing a Republican to her Cabinet is a great idea for Harris, nor is that how they’d like to see her differentiate herself as a candidate.

Harris’s decision to appoint a Republican, if she chooses to do so, wouldn’t be entirely out of the ordinary. For example, Republican Ray LaHood served as secretary of transportation from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama.

Harris has continued to court “Republicans for Harris” throughout her campaign, allowing several Republicans time to speak on the Democratic National Convention stage, including Republican Ana Navarro-Cárdenas of The View and Illinois Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger. Republicans Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney have announced they also plan to vote for Harris.

In a new survey from The New York Times/Siena College, Harris’s Republican support has nearly doubled over the past month.

Former first lady Melania Trump’s self-titled memoir may not divulge political insights from Donald Trump’s White House, but it does offer a glimpse of a woman who once stood beside one of the most powerful men on the planet—and who may soon do so again.

Melania, which was released Tuesday, is a 256-page exploration of the former first lady’s life, from growing up in Cold War–era Yugoslavia to nude modeling in the United States and standing by Trump during his presidency. But some of the most pot-stirring details lie not in what Melania did but rather in what she believes, and how much her own platform differs from that of her MAGA husband.

That includes writing against previous reports from her own aide that she refused to denounce the violence at the U.S. Capitol at the hands of her husband’s supporters on January 6.

“The violence we witnessed was unequivocally unacceptable,” Melania writes in the new book. “While I recognized that many individuals felt the election was mishandled and the vice president should halt the confirmation process, we must never resort to violence.”

But Melania does nothing to dispel the baseless conspiracies her husband has spread that the 2020 election was stolen, either. In fact, she feeds into them, writing, “Many Americans still have doubts about the election to this day. I am not the only person who questions the results.”

Melania also says that she fought her husband on his administration’s family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, telling Trump that “this has to stop.”

“The government should not be taking children away from their parents,” Melania recalled telling the former president shortly before he signed an executive order ending the horrifying policy.

And, perhaps most significantly, Melania revealed that she is staunchly pro-abortion.

“A woman’s fundamental right to individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy,” Melania writes in her book.

That stance was, apparently, totally fine with the aggressively anti-abortion Republican presidential nominee. During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump casually confessed that he had encouraged his wife to “write what you believe” with regard to the new book. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to tell every other woman in America exactly what they should do with their bodies—whether that’s fighting for a national abortion ban or celebrating the encroaching stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization. Trump himself has repeatedly boasted about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and peeling back abortion rights across the nation.

Notably, Melania has done nothing, either while her husband was in office or in the four years since, to actually advance abortion rights in the U.S.

Throughout the book, Melania was quick to blame the influence of “the media, Big Tech, and the deep state” for a variety of her family’s woes, including supposedly preventing her husband’s second term.

“We are living in a dangerous time when it comes to journalism,” she claims.

Kamala Harris has taken a slim lead over Donald Trump over the past month, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College. And that may be in part thanks to rising support among a critical voter group.

Nine percent of people who describe themselves as Republicans said they plan to vote for Harris in November, compared to just 5 percent who said the same thing in the Times poll last month. Harris also has a narrow lead overall against Trump of 49 to 46 percent, with voters more likely to choose her over the former president as caring about people like them and representing change.

This is the first Times/Siena poll in which Harris has led Trump in the race ever since President Biden withdrew and the vice president succeeded him. Last month’s poll had Trump and Harris deadlocked at 47 percent each after the first presidential debate, which Harris was widely seen as winning.

Harris has also taken her first lead in the question of which candidate represents change in the race, with 46 percent of respondents giving her the edge over 44 percent for Trump. The gap widens among younger voters, with 58 percent choosing her versus 34 percent for Trump. The poll has her in the lead as the more fun candidate, as well—43 percent of likely voters, including 13 percent of Republicans, give her the edge over Trump (with just 35 percent).

Trump still has an 11-point advantage over Harris among male voters, and 42 percent of voters overall said his policies helped them personally, compared to 22 percent for Biden. And he retains trust, with 48 percent of voters saying they trust him to handle the issue they see as most important, as opposed to Harris, with 46 percent.

The poll was conducted from September 29 to October 6 among 3,385 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent, and shows that the presidential race is incredibly close with the election less than a month away. Harris has made incredible strides to take a narrow lead and is even winning over key voters in battleground states, such as Hispanic voters in Georgia and Arizona.

But there’s still more work to be done to ensure Harris wins key battleground states like Pennsylvania and therefore the presidency. A key group of people to target could be those left out of polls like this: people who didn’t vote in 2020. While 2020 had the highest voter turnout of any election since 1900, one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote, and the Trump campaign is actively courting them. Recent polls show that Harris could gain a major edge with a cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel.