If you simply troll social media, you probably think vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance just brushed off mass shootings as a “fact of life.” That’s the framing we’ve seen from numerous outlets and it’s been repeated by Trump-hostile media in general.

And I’d be upset, too. There’s absolutely no reason to look at this stuff as a fact of life or accept it as such.

Except, that’s not what Vance said at all, really. 

Oh, he used the words “fact of life,” but all the framing out there ignores the reality of exactly what he said.

Take this piece from USA Today, headlined, “JD Vance decries that school shootings have become ‘a fact of life’.”

Again, the framing. However, here’s what he actually said:

In a campaign rally in Phoenix on Thursday, Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance addressed the recent Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Georgia, that claimed the lives of four people in the Atlanta suburb.

Vance took the opportunity to call for increased security at schools and rail against potential gun control plans by Vice President Kamala Harris

“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, if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we’ve got to bolster security at our schools,” Vance said.

Vance decried the regularity of school shootings in the United States, and doubled down on the importance of increased security.

“If these psychos are gonna go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it. We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in, and we’ve got to deal with it,” Vance said.

How is any of this controversial? What is wrong with a word he said?

This isn’t acceptance, as it’s been framed, but an acknowledgment that these are far too common and that we need to do something about it. This is as noncontroversial a statement as you’re ever going to hear a politician utter. This really is one of those things pretty much everyone agrees with.

It’s the nuts and bolts of such a thing that causes problems.

So why frame it this way? Why make it sound like acceptance? Because Vance doesn’t favor gun control? I hate to break it to people, but not everyone thinks gun control would solve the problem. Opposing gun control isn’t opposition to addressing mass public shootings in our schools. It’s not support of mass murder or anything of the sort.

But maybe they have another reason for this.

I’ll grant they included Vance’s entire statement in the body of the text, but they also have to know an alarming number of people only read headlines and glean what they can from that alone. It’s pretty common knowledge in the industry, especially when you can see your metrics and see that an article was shared on Facebook or X more times than it was actually opened.

They knew what they were doing. They just did it anyway.

I’ll criticize Vance if I think he screwed up. I’ve done it in the past, despite actually liking him more than most other politicians out there. I absolutely loved his story and Hillbilly Elegy is on my must-read list for everyone, but he’s not perfect and I won’t act like he is.

In this, though, he did absolutely nothing wrong and the media can look at stuff like this and answer the question of why people say that no matter how much you hate the media, you don’t hate it enough.