Who will speak for the gunned-down children when J.D. Vance tweets bigotry?

Preach it, Mr. Larkin. Vance is a soul eating cancer and Trump toady.

CLEVELAND -- Anyone who would dare use a mass murder of children as stagecraft in a twisted effort to advance a culture wars agenda clearly qualifies as a horrible human being.

Yet that is precisely what Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio did just hours after the March 28 slaughter of three children and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville. The shooter was Audrey Hale, 28, an emotionally troubled female by birth who at times had described herself as transgender.

After learning of Hale’s gender references, Ohio’s new senator, a Republican who specializes in spreading hate and falsehoods, tweeted, “We’re still learning about the horrific shooting in Nashville. But if early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school, there needs to be a lot of soul searching on the extreme left. Giving in to these ideas isn’t compassion, it’s dangerous.”

The real danger is this bigot having a voice in the nation’s government. Vance’s tweet ignored some inconvenient facts about mass shootings. The Violence Project, a nonpartisan group that tracks mass shootings, found, in a report supported by the National Institute of Justice (an arm of the U.S. Justice Department), that 98% of the 172 mass shooters they studied from 1966 on were males. The report also found that most (52%) of the shooters were white. And it’s clear from recent mass shootings that many of the shooters harbor far-right extremist views.

The average mass shooter in this country looks a lot more like J.D. Vance than Audrey Hale.

https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2023/04/who-will-speak-for-the-gunned-down-children-when-jd-vance-tweets-bigotry-brent-larkin.html