MILWAUKEE — Sen. JD Vance – Trump’s pick for vice-president who once mused about getting rid of the ATF and called Democrats’ efforts to ban bump stocks “a huge distraction” – is getting rave reviews from firearm groups as he debuts at the RNC.
Vance, a Republican junior senator from Ohio and author of "Hillbilly Elegy," delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday in which he highlighted his grandmother's secret gun stash as an example of "American spirit."
"My Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq in 2005. And when we went through her things, we found 19 loaded handguns," Vance said. “Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house. Under her bed, in her closet, in the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on. And it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn’t get around so well. And so, this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit!”
Vance has received a bevy of praise in recent days from the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the National Association for Gun Rights.
Gun Owners of America lauded Vance’s “perfect voting record” on firearms issues.
“Whether it’s his support for abolishing the ATF, his commitment to destroying the federal gun registry, or his opposition to expanded background checks, our members can sleep soundly with his nomination for Vice President,” said Aidan Johnston, GOA’s Director of Federal Affairs.
Meanwhile, gun control groups including Everytown for Gun Safety say that Vance's calls to abolish the ATF amount to defunding law enforcement — and that Vance is in the pockets of the gun lobby.
The National Rifle Association of America reported spending $479,663 to boost Vance’s 2022 bid for Senate, according to a database maintained by Open Secrets.
“There’s a reason the gun lobby spent half a million dollars to elect J.D. Vance: He opposes expanding background checks on gun sales, opposes Red Flag laws to keep guns out of dangerous hands, and supports abolishing the law enforcement agency responsible for protecting Americans from gun violence," John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, told Salon. "Gun extremists have a dream ticket: Trump and Vance would put our communities at risk with their extreme positions on gun safety that are out of step with the American public.”
VANCE'S EARLY STANCE ON GUNS
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance worked as an attorney for nearly two years before moving to San Francisco to eventually work as a venture capitalist with billionaire investor Peter Thiel — who later spent millions to boost Vance's Senate campaign.
Vance rose to some prominence in 2016 with the publication of his New York Times best-selling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," in which the Ivy League-educated Marine reflected on the challenges facing the “white working class” and its embrace of Republicans and Internet conspiracy theories.
By the end of 2016, Vance announced his intentions to return to Ohio and perhaps run for office.
At a Versailles, Ohio golf club in March 2018, Vance spoke at the Darke County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner and answered a question about the Parkland school shooting.
According to a report from The Daily Advocate & Early Bird News, Vance then claimed that school shootings are less common now than 15 to 20 years ago.
“I do think it’s important for us to keep some perspective when we’re trying to fix problems like this,” Vance said.
Data collected by the Washington Post on school shootings suggests Vance was wrong: the U.S. saw 30 school shootings in 2018, up from seven in 1999.
Also on that day in Versailles, Vance said law enforcement could take steps to ensure guns don’t fall into the hands of dangerous individuals.
“We should make it easier to take those guns out of the hands of people who are about to use them to murder large numbers of people,” he said. “I think it’s important we don’t get so caught up in this particular moment that we sacrifice the Second Amendment process, and that’s what I worry about.”
Vance added: "We’ve got to have the right balance between protecting citizens, protecting our schools, and protecting the kids that go to them, but also protecting our really important and fundamental constitutional liberty.”
Guns.com – an online marketplace for guns and a source of news for gun enthusiasts – acknowledged this week that “there seems to be some evidence that he leaned towards red flag laws of some sort in 2018.”
But as Guns.com noted, Vance later became a strident opponent of gun safety bills sought by Democrats once he began running for office.
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VANCE’S TURN TO THE RIGHT
By 2022, as a U.S. Senate candidate, Vance called red flag laws a “slippery slope” that “don’t solve the problem of gun violence.”
According to the Ohio Capital Journal, Vance said he wouldn’t vote for a bipartisan gun deal to enhance background checks for gun buyers under 21 years of age that Biden ended up signing.
In the wake of the 2022 mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y. and Uvalde, Texas, Vance told local Ohio station WLWT-TV that “the idea that expanded background checks is going to solve that problem is unfortunately not true."
Vance also called for eliminating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — whose duties include tracing firearms used in crimes — in a 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson.
At the time, The Free Beacon had reported on a 2021 letter from the ATF to a congressman concerning the agency’s system for manually searching for firearms records from gun retailers who have gone out of business.
A 2016 GAO report found that the ATF’s National Tracing Center has to consult its repository of “‘out-of-business records” in more than one-third of trace requests involving an entity that has gone out of business.
The ATF’s repository allows users to search for individual records using the unique number assigned to every federal firearms license.
But the repository stores firearms purchaser information and other data as image files without optical character recognition - meaning firearms purchaser information can’t be searched using text.
In 1979, Congress restricted the ATF from consolidating or centralizing federal firearm license records – and Republicans and gun rights groups have long claimed the ATF has failed to comply with that rule.
The ATF, in its letter to Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas, said it has over 920,000 out-of-business records as of November 2021. The agency also said its repository complied with the 1979 restrictions.
The Free Beacon’s report quoted a director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America, who called the letter “clear evidence that a partial national gun registry exists.”
Days later, Vance appeared on Fox News to call the repository a “back door to a gun registry in this country.”
“And if you look at what liberals have done in Europe, what they've done in Australia, once you allow gun registry, you effectively allow the disarming of your citizenry,” Vance told host Tucker Carlson. “This is ultimately about destroying the Second Amendment, just as the Democrats' alliance with Big Tech is about destroying the First Amendment. And my basic argument here, Tucker, is look, if the Democrats are going to ignore the heavily armed drug cartels on our southern border that use the ATF to go after law-abiding citizens, why don't we just get rid of the ATF?”
Once elected to the Senate with a last-minute boost from Trump, Vance in 2023 expressed support for allowing schools to decide to arm teachers.
“I hate to say this, I don't like this, but we're living in a world where people have decided that our schools are soft targets,” Vance told local broadcast outlet WKEF.
When asked about his response to critics who say teachers and staff shouldn’t act in a dual capacity, Vance said: “I guess my response is you have to let the local officials decide what's in the best interest of their community.”
And this year as the Senate debated legislation to ban bump stocks, Vance called the Democrats’ push a “huge distraction.”
“I think that we have to ask ourselves: What is the real gun violence problem in this country, and are we legislating in a way that solves fake problems? Or solves real problems?” Vance told reporters, according to NBC News. “And my very strong suspicion is that the Schumer legislation is aimed at a PR problem, not something that’s going to meaningfully reduce gun violence in this country.”
Bump stocks are replacement shoulder stocks that allow a semiautomatic gun to fire at nearly the rate of a machine gun.
The Trump administration banned bump stocks in 2018, with the support of the NRA, in the wake of the 2017 deadly Las Vegas mass shooting that ultimately took the lives of 60 people.
The gunman had modified 12 of his rifles with bump stocks.
The Senate’s debate over bump stocks followed the Supreme Court decision that overturned Trump’s ban on bump stocks.
The government had argued that bump stocks should fall under Congress’s 1934 restrictions on civilian ownership of machine guns – and Trump’s regulations banned bump stocks as machineguns.
In a 6-3 ruling, conservative justices on the Supreme Court said that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority.
A bump stock does not alter the basic mechanics of bump firing, and the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot,” reads the ruling.
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“CRAZY STUFF”
Vance's statements about the role of internet conspiracies — including those involving the Newtown gun massacre— have also evolved over the years.
In 2018, Sandy Hook families sued Newtown conspiracy theorist and provocateur Alex Jones for defamation for spreading disproven conspiracies that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a "false flag" operation.
Families ultimately won a nearly $1.5 billion judgment against Jones, who filed for bankruptcy and plans to shut down his site InfoWars and liquidate its assets.
In his 2016 memoir, Vance said distrust in the press had left Internet conspiracies to rule the “digital world.”
Vance wrote that he had received messages from his friends or family about conspiracies – including “that the Newtown gun massacre was engineered by the federal government to turn public opinion on gun control measures.”
“But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin — despite all evidence to the contrary — it’s a good bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we’d like,” Vance wrote.
Vance also wrote: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
By September 2021, Vance struck a different tone – at least about Jones.
Vance wrote in a tweet that: “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.”
Vance made similar comments at a subsequent September 2021 young conservative Teneo Network gathering, according to video obtained by ProPublica.
To the Teneo Network gathering and also on Fox News Radio, Vance said he was “trolling” with his tweet – but in his speech, he said “that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue.”
“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”
Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”
He said Jones says some “crazy stuff” like 9/11 was an inside job – but also says that Jones says other things that Vance thinks “are interesting.”
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