The American Independent: J.D. Vance backed ‘red flag’ gun laws in 2018. Now he calls them ‘a giant distraction.’
March 22, 2022
Columbus, OH — A new report from The American Independent caught J.D. Vance flip-flopping on his support for a key gun violence prevention measure. It’s the latest political reinvention for Vance, which the article notes is “the latest in a long series of flip-flops from positions” as he struggles to compete in this crowded and nasty primary.
“The only thing Ohioans can trust about J.D. Vance is that he will sell out Ohioans for whatever political calculation he thinks will best serve him in the moment,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.
The American Independent: J.D. Vance backed ‘red flag’ gun laws in 2018. Now he calls them ‘a giant distraction.’
Josh Israel
March 21, 2022
- Republican Ohio Senate hopeful J.D. Vance has spent much of his campaign attacking “gun grabbers” and opposing firearm regulations. But just four years ago, he urged his party to pass the very laws he now rails against.
- The author and venture capitalist appeared at a March 2018 Darke County Republican Party dinner as the featured speaker. According to a local newspaper report on the event, Vance appeared to endorse new laws to disarm those who are an imminent danger to others.
- “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 argued at the time. “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.”
- Even then-President Donald Trump endorsed the idea in 2019 in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “We can and will stop this evil contagion,” he promised. “That is why I have called for red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders.”
- But since announcing his Senate campaign, Vance has abandoned his support for any new gun safety legislation.
- Last July, Vance wrote an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch warning that President Joe Biden and an “unholy alliance” was coming for Americans’ guns and other liberties. “Violence in our country is much more about density than guns,” he asserted. “That’s why the Biden Administration’s dull attempts to curb gun violence don’t work and they threaten the very foundation of the rights we are afforded as free, American citizens.”
- Vance’s campaign issues page contains similar language. “Joe Biden and anti-democracy multinational companies are trying to find new ways to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. They’re making it harder to buy firearms and ammunition, and imposing new, unconstitutional regulations on American citizens,” Vance’s campaign website reads. “I will fight the gun grabbers, whether they’re federal bureaucrats enacting regulations or multinational companies punishing people for exercising their rights.”
- Vance’s reversal on this is but the latest in a long series of flip-flops from positions the “Hillbilly Elegy” author took before he decided to run for political office.
- In 2016, he frequently lambasted then-candidate Trump as “xenophobic” and “an idiot”. Last year, he said he regretted criticizing Trump and was “wrong about the guy.”
- Shortly after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Vance openly acknowledged the role white privilege plays in America, saying there were “obviously still advantages to being white” and “there are still disadvantages to being Black.” As a candidate, Vance now wants people to have the power to file lawsuits against companies that tell anyone to “deconstruct their privilege, or they need to sacrifice or repent of their whiteness.”
- He also once backed mask mandates to curb the coronavirus pandemic but went on to question why kids should have to wear masks. “I don’t know why we should mask our children under any circumstance, but especially not when Biden/Harris refuse to control COVID at our border,” Vance tweeted last August.