PORTSMOUTH: Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Wednesday implored Americans to stop the “epidemic of gun violence” plaguing the United States, after a mass shooting at a Georgia high school left four people dead.
The US vice president, speaking at a rally in New Hampshire, also reiterated her call for a ban on assault weapons – a position widely opposed by Republicans – and her support for further tightening of gun safety laws in the United States.
“This is just a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies,” Harris said of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, the latest outbreak of gun violence to hit a country that has already seen hundreds of mass shootings this year.
“And it's just outrageous that every day in our country, in the United States of America, parents send their children to school worried about whether their children will come home alive or not,” he added.
“We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn't have to be this way,” Harris, locked in a tight race with Republican former President Donald Trump, told the crowd before beginning to lay out elements of her economic plan.
Trump, seen by his party as a defender of gun rights, posted on social media that “our hearts go out to the victims” and said “these precious children were taken from us too soon by a sick and deranged monster.”
Harris, a former California prosecutor and attorney general and former U.S. senator, called on Congress to “finally” pass an assault weapons ban, similar to the one President Joe Biden helped draft as a senator that became law in 1994.
That ban expired in 2004 and Congress did not renew it.
Harris also called for adopting universal background checks and implementing so-called red flag laws — state protection orders intended to prevent certain people deemed a threat from purchasing or possessing firearms.
“It's the wrong choice to say you're pro-Second Amendment or you want to take guns away from everyone,” Harris said. “I'm pro-Second Amendment and I know we need reasonable gun safety laws in our country.”
