After months of speculation, Donald Trump has announced U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate in the 2024 election. The first-term senator has been an outspoken supporter of the Second Amendment since he announced his Senate candidacy in 2021, including offering praise of the Supreme Court's decision striking down the ATF's administrative ban on bump stocks in Garland v. Cargill just a few weeks ago. 

Vance also panned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's attempt to adopt a bump stock ban via unanimous consent, calling it a "distraction" and a "fake problem" for lawmakers. 

In his campaign for Senate, Vance garnered the endorsement of the NRA thanks to his support for national right-to-carry reciprocity and opposition to bans on "assault weapons" and large capacity magazines. In the early days of his campaign Vance penned a column in the Columbus Dispatch slamming Biden's then-recent nomination of gun control activist David Chipman as ATF director and highlighted the dangers of the Biden administration using the agency to enact new gun controls without a vote in Congress. 

David Chipman is the worst kind of gun-grabber: uninterested in people’s rights or whether gun seizures even work. In the past, organizations Chipman has represented have argued that the Second Amendment doesn’t even apply to handguns, something that would have surely surprised our handgun-owning founding fathers. 

Biden has also pushed for executive orders that would restrict “ghost guns” and certain types of firearm braces. This is the worst kind of political showmanship: these restrictions will make it harder for law-abiding Ohioans to exercise their Second Amendment rights and neither will have even a small effect on gun violence in our country.

In that same column, Vance acknowledged unacceptably high rates of violent crime, but asserted that, "Democrat arguments for gun control rest on a series of falsehoods."

On its face, this sounds reasonable: we do have high rates of gun violence, and we do have sky-high rates of gun ownership. But it’s helpful to zoom in, and when you do, you find that the areas of our country with the highest gun ownership rates have the lowest homicide rates. Wyoming, for instance, has an extremely low murder rate, despite having among the highest rates of gun ownership in America. 

Violence in our country is much more about density than guns.

That’s why the Biden Administration’s dull attempts to curb gun violence don’t work and they threaten the very foundation of the rights we are afforded as free, American citizens.

The following year, while still running for the Senate, Vance objected to the framework of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act proposed in the wake of the murders at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. While Vance had not yet taken office, he took issue with the language of the bill while on the campaign trail that summer. 

Vance conceded that the U.S. has a “high gun violence rate,” but pinned the problem on what he termed urban inner-city crime. He argued violence has been coming down for the last 30 years despite guns being more available.

“So, in some ways it’s not even accurate to call it a gun violence problem,” Vance said. “It is a violence problem that has gotten worse over the last few years, not because of more guns, but because of negative law enforcement.” 

... “From what I’ve seen of this bill, I would not support it,” Vance said Wednesday on a Breitbart radio show. “I think the red flag laws, in particular, they certainly are a slippery slope. They also don’t solve the problem of gun violence.”

Vance's more recent opposition to "red flag" laws may represent a bit of a change of heart. Back in 2018, just a few weeks after the Parkland shootings, he told Republicans in Ohio that he backed Extreme Risk Protection Orders, telling a gathering of Republicans in Darke County that "we should make it easier to take those guns out of the hands of people who are about to use them to murder large numbers of people." 

Pointing out that school shootings are actually less common now than they were 15 to 20 years ago, he said. “I do think it’s important for us to keep some perspective when we’re trying to fix problems like this.”

Vance said he hoped there could be further ways for law enforcement to prevent guns from falling in the hands of dangerous individuals.

“We should make it easier to take those guns out of the hands of people who are about to use them to murder large numbers of people,” he said.

“I think it’s important we don’t get so caught up in this particular moment that we sacrifice the Second Amendment process, and that’s what I worry about,” he added. “We’ve got to have the right balance between protecting citizens, protecting our schools, and protecting the kids that go to them, but also protecting our really important and fundamental constitutional liberty.”

That comment is essentially the sum of Vance's stated support for gun control over the years, however, and as both a candidate and sitting U.S. senator, he hasn't demonstrated any inkling of support for ERPO laws or any other restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. On the contrary; he's been a vocal supporter of the Second Amendment and a conscientious objector to the anti-gun machinations of Senate Democrats. None of the candidates on Trump's short list of running mates were what I'd consider anti-gun, but Vance had shown his ability to speak out forcefully in defense of our Second Amendment rights... as well as to name and shame those politicians like Joe Biden who want to eradicate them.