Sen. JD Vance did a pretty good job in his debate with Gov. Tim Walz earlier this week.
Then again, it wasn’t hard to do. Walz looked like a deer in the headlights while Vance looked confident and prepared. Some of the people trying to defend Walz have been almost as hilarious as Walz’s all-too-convincing Elmer Fudd impression.
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But that doesn’t mean Vance couldn’t do better. There’s always room for improvement, after all, but on one topic in particular, gun writer David Codrea feels Vance missed the boat.
The first blown opportunity arose when the subject of abortion was raised and Tim Walz complained that under a Trump administration, “the states will decide what’s right for Texas might not be right for Washington. That’s not how this works. This is basic human right.”
The right to arms and to defend life and liberty are basic human rights as well, and for that, former President Barack Obama, addressing handgun bans overturned in the Heller decision, said “What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne.” Disregarding for a moment that the ban hardly “worked” in Chicago, it points to Democrat hypocrisy when they cry “home rule” to impose municipal infringements disallowed by state preemption laws but then turn around and demand nationwide citizen disarmament edicts.
When the subject turned to “America’s gun violence, epidemic” rather than calling out CBS News moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan for using a loaded and pejorative term, Vance repeatedly used it himself. The truth of course, as economist John Lott has demonstrated, is “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them,” meaning there is no justification for blanket citizen disarmament “laws.”
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I’m not sure if the issue is the term “gun violence” which a lot of people object to or referring to this as America’s “epidemic.” If it’s the former, I’ll give Vance a pass since arguing about that term wouldn’t win him many friends and would ultimately be spun in ways that would hurt him in November. The average American accepts the term and isn’t interested in quibbling.
But based on Codrea’s other comments, I think he’s talking about this whole idea that this is a national crisis, and I get it.
However, I will point out that we do the same thing, to some degree, such as pointing out Chicago or Baltimore’s homicide issues. We’re a bit more local, of course, but the truth is that the problems lie in particular neighborhoods.
Yet the truth is that it’s not an overall issue and Vance would have done well to point that out, to correctly note that the issue in even the most violent states is that a small number of neighborhoods account for the lion’s share of violent crime.
Vance did not respond to O’Donnell’s loaded statement that he opposes “red flag gun laws and legislation to ban certain semi-automatic rifles, including AR-15s,” with a persuasive explanation of why due process means you can’t punish before you convict, how gun prohibitions don’t stop dangerous criminals from obtaining them, and how removing guns but not criminals leave society at risk from proven threats. He chose not to explain why the Second Amendment mandates “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and to educate on what “arms” are and why the Framers thought it important for the citizenry to be capable to respond to trained and equipped military threats. Instead, he tried to sound conciliatory to holding parents responsible for criminal actions of their children, saying “I certainly trust local law enforcement and local authorities to make those decisions.”
Really? In deep blue Seattle and San Francisco? From Chicago to Cheyenne?
He also continued with the language of the left decrying “illegal guns,” which, rather than meaning “stolen” has been expanded to include types of firearms the government doesn’t want to allow you to have, and to fraudulently “legitimize” a non-Constitutional power of government to approve or disapprove transfers.
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I’d argue that “illegal guns” also include those created for the illegal market, such as “ghost guns,” and those purchased via straw buys for people who are prohibited.
But again, that’s a quibble.
Codrea has a lot of issues with how Vance handled guns, including not pushing back on the claim that there are people preventing gun research to even being done. That’s simply not true and it’s predicated on some kind of misunderstanding. It’s an out-and-out lie, and Vance blew it there. The Dickey Amendment never prevented gun research as a whole and it didn’t even prevent the CDC from doing research. They just opted to interpret it that way because they knew they were going to do biased research specifically to advance gun control.
But gun control has been going on for decades and no one has tried to prevent it.
The truth is that while Vance did pretty well overall, he missed on a few points on the gun debate.
That’s not enough to hurt him overall–the fact that he was debating Walz meant he’d probably have to try to blow the debate to lose–but it could have been better. My hope is that as he engages in discussion in the final weeks leading up to the election, he can hone his Second Amendment message. I hope he learns and fills the gaps in his own knowledge of the gun debate.
Either way, though, it’s pretty clear that he’s the better choice on guns.
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