On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski claimed that 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) dismissed school shootings as “fact of life,” despite video that she played earlier in the segment that disproved her assertion and demonstrated that Vance advocated for stronger security at schools to help prevent shootings and said that it’s a “fact of life” that deranged people know schools are soft targets.
Brzezinski played video of Vance, in which Vance said, “What is going to solve this problem, and I really do believe this, is, look, I don’t like this, I don’t like to admit this, I don’t like that this is a fact of life, but if you’re a psycho, and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets, and we have got to bolster security at our schools, so that a person who walks through the front door — we’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.”
Co-host Willie Geist then noted that Vance called for better security, and stated, “his full comment was, ‘I don’t like that this is a fact of life,’ he said, we don’t have to like the reality we live in, but it is the reality we live in.”
Geist continued, “So, you would think that that would prompt him, then, to say, let’s sit down and change this reality, let’s sit down and do something about it. Because, clearly, having the school resource officers there, who acted heroically the other day and probably prevented more kids and teachers from dying, it wasn’t enough to save the poor people who did die.”
Brzezinski then argued, in contradiction to the video she had just played, “[T]hat comment that he made right there is another very, very stark example of the difference between these two campaigns, Harris-Walz vs. Trump-Vance, they see it — Trump-Vance — as a fact of life. And Kamala Harris immediately said, after the shooting, this is a choice we’re making, and we have to make a different choice. People don’t want this to be a fact of life, nobody wants to choose this.”
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