An Open Letter to JD Vance

Dear JD Vance ...

I can’t figure you out. It’s not the mascara because there are boys who like their eyes to pop! And it’s not really the couch-fucking, though I won’t be sitting on any furniture in your house should I come to visit. And it’s not the fact that you can’t order a donut.

And it’s not even the way you went from calling The Felon and "idiot" and said he was "reprehensible" and compared him to Hitler just eight years ago and now you’re Mike Pence 2.0.

It’s your stance on children and parenting. I mean, you denigrate anyone who doesn’t have children, calling them less than, though I should remind you that Kamala DOES have kids and so does Pete Buttigieg even though you called them childless. And then you suggest that people who have children should be able to vote for their children because they are valuable to this country.

And now, in the wake of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia that left four people dead—the 45th school shooting in the United States of Guns so far this year—and you say we should just get used to it, that our children being slaughtered in schools is a “fact of life.”

How do you justify that with your stance on children being an asset to protect, on children being the most important part of a marriage, but when children are left dead, and parents are left childless, we should just get used to it?

You also said schools need more security because, after decades and decades of mass shootings, the problem isn’t more guns at all, it’s that we don’t have armed security at school. But there was security at Apalachee High School and still a gun was brought into school because America loves guns more than children, more than Americans.

You also called school shootings a reality and said “we don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”

We have to deal with Sandy Hook, and Apalachee High School and Uvalde and Buell Elementary and Lake Worth Middle School and the University of Washington Medical Center and the University of Arkansas and Carter G. Woodson Middle School and Junipero Serra High School and Osborn High School and Santana High School and Bishop Neumann High School and Granite Hills high School and Lew Wallace High School and Pacific Lutheran University and on and on and on …

Deal with it. It’s a fact of life.

It’s a fact of death, but only in  this country because people like JD Vance and those on the right are beholden to the gun lobby and will do anything from thoughts to prayers, but no real action, on the issue of guns in  this country.

Well, guess what JD?

We’re tired of dealing with it. We’re tired of your thoughts and prayers and your “now is not the time to discuss gun legislation” as the schools wash the blood off their playground and hallways and classrooms.

Now is not the time? Fact of life? Deal with it?

Fred Guttenberg, a gun control activist whose daughter was killed in a 2018 Parkland school shooting:

"School shootings are a fact of life? My daughter Jaime's murder was a fact of life? I can't wait to make your exit from having any say in our public safety a fact of life. I can't wait to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.’

And that’s what we need to do; do not vote for the guy who basically said “whatever” to school shootings, or for his partner in gun death, The Felon, who in January told supporters after an Iowa school shooting that “we have to get over it.”

Neither of these two men have announced official policies on gun control, though his campaign manager Chris LaCivita says The Felon would continue to oppose gun control efforts.

The fact is children are dying in this country and we’re tired of being told by the hypocritical party of family values to deal with it and get over it. We’re being told on one hand that children make a family, and family is the most important thing, but that if your child is gun down in school … oh well.

If you’re so serious in your position to let children die, JD, then go to Apalachee and tell those parents who no longer have children to deal with it; tell them to their faces to get over it, it’s a fact of life.

And then fuck all the way off.

PS As much as you repulse me in most every area of life, and as much as I despise you and everything you stand for, I hope that you never have to go through what any parent in this country has gone through, sending their child off to school to be slaughtered by an idiot with a gun.