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      Backlash for JD Vance after calling school shooting a ‘fact of life’

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      America’s ideological split over gun control has spilled over into the presidential campaign after JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, voiced regret that school shootings had “become a fact of life” in the US.Vance’s comments – in the wake of the latest deadly shooting, at Apalachee high school in Georgia – ignited a political row after Democrats depicted them as evidence of a lack of empathy while Republicans claimed the remarks had been taken out of context.Vance called for more security measures in schools without mentioning gun control, while Democrats including Kamala Harris and the US president, Joe Biden, want a ban on assault-style rifles, more background checks and other gun safety action.Asked about the Georgia shooting while speaking at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Vance said: “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 are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise that our schools are soft targets.”The boy who is charged in the Georgia school shooting is 14 years old.Vance continued: “We’ve got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … and wants to kill a bunch of children – they’re not able to. As a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”The remarks, which were prefaced by an attack on the pro-gun control stance of Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election, were immediately seized on by the Harris campaign.“School shootings are not just a fact of life,” the Democratic nominee posted on X (formerly Twitter), linking to footage of Vance’s comments.“It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children – and we will.”Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, had accused Harris of wanting to “take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them”.Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly polarised on gun control, with one party standing on the issue of gun owners’ rights and the other identifying with efforts to bring stricter controls.But the row between the two presidential tickets was overshadowed by Republican anger at the Associated Press, which had been accused of misrepresenting Vance’s comments in a post on X.“JD VANCE says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” read the post. It was subsequently taken down and replaced with a more nuanced version providing greater explanation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and says the US needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia,” the second iteration read. A second follow-up post said: “This post replaces an earlier post that was deleted to add context to the partial quote from Vance.”The posts were greeted with derision on X, with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, writing: “AP stand for Associated Propaganda.”On Thursday night, Tim Walz, the governor or Minnesota and Harris’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, posted to X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly called Twitter, a clip of Vance’s speech, and commented: “This is pathetic. We can’t quit on our kids – they deserve better.”Trump, responding to a question on the Georgia shootings at a Fox News town hall meeting from the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, said: “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons and we’re going to make it better, and we’re going to heal our world.”The former president has been accused of showing a lack of sympathy after previous shooting episodes. In response to a deadly assault in Perry, Iowa, last January that killed three people, he said: “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it – we have to move forward.”A 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray, is in police custody and is expected to be tried on four counts of murder over Wednesday’s shooting in Georgia, which left two pupils and two teachers dead. The authorities have pressed second-degree murder charges against his father, Colin Gray, for allowing his son to posses the gun. More

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      Extremist or mainstream: how do Tim Walz’s policies match up globally?

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      Within hours of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, being chosen by Kamala Harris to be her Democratic presidential running mate, Donald Trump and team began attacking him as a “dangerously liberal extremist”.Trump surrogates seized on Walz’s record of expanding voting rights for former felons, combatting the climate crisis, and other measures as proof that Harris-Walz would be the “most radical ticket in American history”.If you step back from the melee, and look at his gubernatorial acts through a global lens, they appear anything but extreme. From the perspective of other industrialised nations, what Trump denounces as leftwing radicalism looks little more than basic public welfare provisions.Far from being militant and revolutionary, initiatives such as paid family leave, free college tuition and rudimentary gun controls – all championed by Walz in Minnesota – have long been regarded as middle-of-the-road and unremarkable in large swathes of the world. Through this frame, it is not Walz who is the outlier, but his Republican critics.Here are how some of Walz’s most impactful reforms compare with the rest of the world.Free school lunchesView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn.” That was Walz’s sardonic reply to CNN when he was asked about having introduced free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota schoolkids. The 2023 measure puts Minnesota among just eight US states that offer school meals at no cost to all children, no matter their family’s income.Around the world: Several countries provide free lunches for their children nationwide. Sweden, Finland and the three Baltic nations all provide meals at no cost for all schoolchildren irrespective of income, and many more European countries provide targeted or subsidised meals. Even a developing country such as India ensures access to lunch for more than 100 million kids daily.“The idea of offering free meals to all students during the school day is hardly new – many countries already do so,” said Alexis Bylander at the Food Research and Action Center, a US anti-hunger organisation. “Numerous studies show the benefits, including improving student attendance, behaviour and academic success.”Combatting the climate crisisView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: In February 2023 Walz signed legislation committing Minnesota to having all its electricity produced by wind, solar and other clean energy sources by 2040 – an even more ambitious timeframe than adopted by California, America’s sustainable energy leader. The legislature also passed more than 40 climate initiatives, including expanding charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and introducing a new code for commercial buildings to cut energy use by 80% by 2036.Around the world: By global standards, Minnesota’s ambitions do not stand out. Some 27 countries have written into law target dates by which they will become net zero – that is, stop loading additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the developed world, Finland is leading the way, pledging to be net zero by 2035, and to begin absorbing more carbon dioxide than it produces by 2040. In December, almost 200 countries at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai agreed to call on all countries to transition away from fossil fuels and for global renewable energy to be tripled by 2030.Child tax creditView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: Last year the governor signed into law a child tax credit program for low-income Minnesota families. The measure sought to fill the hole left by a federal scheme that expired in 2021 after Congress failed to extend it. The Minnesota plan is the most generous of its type in the US, offering $1,750 per child and reaching more than 400,000 children.Around the world: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the forum of high-income democracies, reported in 2018 that 34 of the 35 countries with available information provided their people with some form of family benefit including tax credits. The OECD compared the value of family benefits for two-child families, measured as a percentage of average earnings, across 41 countries and found that the US came in at No 40, with only Turkey being less generous in its support.Basic gun controlsView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: The governor identifies as a proud gun-owner and hunter, and he accepted Harris’s invitation to be her running mate wearing a camo hat. That didn’t stop him in May 2023 enacting a slew of gun safety measures, including requiring all private sales of handguns and semi-automatic rifles to go through an FBI background check that looks for evidence of criminal or mental health risks. The changes also introduced a “red flag law” that allows relatives and other interested parties to intervene when someone is in danger of injuring themselves or others with guns.Around the world: International comparisons show that Americans own vastly more guns than civilians in other rich countries – 121 guns per 100 Americans, compared with five guns per 100 people in the United Kingdom. The number of gun killings per 100,000 people is also vastly higher: 4.12 in the US, 0.04 in the UK.Other countries also have much tougher gun controls that make those introduced by Walz look weak by comparison. Canada requires gun buyers to have a licence to possess or acquire a firearm and first time applicants have to wait a mandatory 28 days; it also imposes mandatory safety training and a ban on military-style rifles that does not exist in the US. The UK also bans some semi-automatic rifles and most handguns. Japan tightly restricts gun ownership, banning most guns other than air guns and a few other special categories and even then requiring owners to submit to annual inspections.Paid family and medical leaveWalz’s record: House File 2, enacted by the governor last year, gave Minnesotans access to up to 20 weeks in every year of partial wages to cover medical leave after a life-changing diagnosis, mental health leave, or time off to care for a new baby. “Paid family and medical leave is about investing in the people that made our state and economy strong in the first place,” Walz said as he signed the bill.Around the world: The US is the only OECD member country without a national law giving all workers access to paid leave for new mothers. Thirty-seven out 38 OECD countries offer national paid maternity leave – the only exception being the US. France, which holds the top spot, allows mothers and fathers to take paid leave until their child is three years old.The US is also one of only six countries with no form of national paid leave covering either family or medical leave in the case of a health concern.Voting rights for former felonsWalz’s record: The governor signed a bill that restores the vote to more than 50,000 Minnesotans who have been convicted of a felony. The Trump campaign denounced the measure as evidence of Walz’s “dangerously liberal agenda”, which is ironic, given that Trump himself, as a convicted felon, will only be able to vote for himself in November thanks to a similar reform in New York.Around the world: A report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in June concluded that the US was an “outlier nation in that it strips voting rights from millions of citizens solely on the basis of a criminal conviction”. In 2022, more than 4 million people in the US were disenfranchised on those grounds. By contrast, when HRW surveyed 136 countries around the world, it found that the majority never or rarely deny the vote because of a criminal record, while those with restrictions tend to be much less draconian in their approach than US states. More

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      How Tim Walz went from NRA favorite to ‘straight Fs’ on gun rights

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      At his first rally as Kamala Harris’s running mate Tuesday, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, invoked an issue at the forefront of many Americans’ minds: the right “for our children to be free to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in their classrooms”.But Walz wasn’t always a fierce advocate against gun violence. The evolution of the vice-presidential candidate, who once boasted an A rating from the NRA, shows the growing relevance of gen Z voters, who’ve grown up amid a surge in mass shootings in the US and are enthusiastically backing Harris.“Gun violence is the number one killer of our generation, meaning we can’t afford anything less than leaders who will prioritize basic gun safety,” Timberlyn Mazeikis, a gun violence survivor and volunteer leader with Students Demand Action from Minnesota, said in a joint statement issued by Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action supporting Walz yesterday.Elected to the US House of Representatives in 2007, Walz was long beloved by gun rights advocates. The National Rifle Association endorsed and donated to his campaigns, giving him an A rating. In 2016 Guns & Ammo magazine included him on its list of top 20 politicians for gun owners.That wasn’t terribly surprising. Walz was representing a rural red Minnesota district and had grown up at a time and place where guns were popular for hunting – not mass shootings.“I grew up in a small town, [so] I’d put my shotgun in my car, or at school or in the football locker, to go pheasant hunting afterwards,” he told Pod Save America last month. “But we weren’t getting shot in school.”That all changed after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, he has said.In a 2018 video March for Our Lives co-founder and Parkland survivor David Hogg reshared on X last month, Walz recounts his then teenage daughter Hope approaching him in the days after the shooting: “Dad, you’re the only person I know who’s in elected office, you need to stop what’s happening with this.”“For me, it was both a reckoning and an embarrassment,” he told Pod Save America, recalling that the children killed at Sandy Hook elementary school would have been his son’s age.Two weeks later, while campaigning for governor, Walz authored an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, where he called the NRA “the biggest single obstacle to passing the most basic measures to prevent gun violence in America”. He went on to say that he’d donated the $18,000 the organization had donated to his past campaigns and wouldn’t accept NRA contributions in the future. He noted that he was currently co-sponsoring a “bump stocks” ban and came out in support of an assault weapons ban.As Minnesota governor, Walz has signed wide-ranging gun safety measures into law, most notably a 2023 law including universal background checks and a “red flag law” (which allows state officials to temporarily seize the firearms of someone a court has ruled may be dangerous to themselves or others).This year, Walz called for Minnesota lawmakers to go even further, asking them to support measures that would require safe firearm storage, better reporting of lost and stolen guns, and harsher penalties for “straw buyers” (those who purchase firearms for others who cannot legally have them). Since then, he’s signed legislation that prohibits automatic weapon modification devices and collects data on gun crime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWalz remains an enthusiastic hunter – something he’s emphasized in previous campaigns and makes him something of an everyman.“There’s a vision to reduce gun violence with absolutely no infringement on those who lawfully own guns, to use them for things that many of us cherish,” he told reporters in Bloomington, Minnesota, last week.Gun safety advocates have already come out in support of his candidacy, including the gun violence prevention organization founded by former congresswoman and gun violence survivor Gabby Giffords (who joined Walz in Minnesota in 2023 when he signed the state’s universal background checks into law).“As governor, Tim did what others called impossible, passing background checks and extreme risk protection laws in Minnesota with a slim gun safety majority,” Giffords said. “It wasn’t easy, but he got it done with hard work and effective leadership. His work as governor has saved lives, and I know that will continue when he is vice-president.”Harris’s campaign, which has already drawn great support from gen Z voters and gun violence prevention advocates, has called for an assault weapons ban, universal background checks and red flag laws. Last month, the NRA called her “an existential threat to the second amendment”.That doesn’t seem to bother Walz. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s,” he tweeted last month. “And I sleep just fine.” More

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      The coach v the couch: key takeaways from the first Harris-Walz rally

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      Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to supporters at a packed, energetic rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The event, which kicks off a week-long tour through the most politically competitive US states, marks a new chapter for the Harris campaign after securing enough delegates to be the Democratic nominee.Here’s what you need to know:Harris sought to define Walz foremost as a teacher, veteran and football coachHarris called Walz the “kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having”. She told a story about him agreeing to lead his school’s gay-straight alliance, knowing “the signal it would send to have a football coach get involved”.Harris also spoke of his skills as a marksman and his views on the second amendment. And finally, she talked at length about Walz’s time in the army national guard and his service to the country.Walz focused on a unifying, future-focused messageWalz, who like Harris is known for his smile, started his speech by saying: “Thank you for the trust you put in me, but more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.” He then spoke about growing up in the “heartland”, respecting neighbors, and his family of educators, attempting to differentiate the ticket from Donald Trump and JD Vance’s focus on mass deportation and crime.“If Donald Trump and JD Vance are irritated that Kamala Harris smiles and laughs, they’re really going to be irritated by Tim Walz,” Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of Minnesota’s house of representatives, told the Guardian.’Mind your own damn business’: Walz attacked the Trump-Vance ticket with a focus on reproductive rights and other freedomsWalz talked about his daughter Hope, who often appears in videos and photographs with her father, being born through IVF, and Republican attacks on contraception and abortion. Abortion opponents have been increasingly pushing for broader measures that would give rights and protections to embryos and fetuses, which could have big implications for fertility treatments.He also spoke about gun control, a tenet of the Harris campaign, saying he supported the second amendment but that children should have the freedom to go to school without the concern of school shootings.Walz made a direct hit at Project 2025, the conservative manifesto created by Trump allies and advisers. “Don’t believe him when he plays dumb,” he said of the former president. “He knows exactly what Project 2025 will to do restrict our freedoms.”He encapsulated his idea in another sticky colloquialism to counter Republicans hoping to intervene in medical practices and schools: “Mind your own damn business.”Josh Shapiro, who had been a vice-presidential contender, still made his markThe Pennsylvania governor who was also in the final running to be Harris’s running mate, spoke before Harris and Walz. His pitch-perfect and fiery speech helped set the tone for the rally, and he threw his support behind the newly announced ticket.Shapiro and Walz’s speeches also made the distinction between the two politicians clear. Shapiro has been described as Obama-like in his polished and forceful delivery. Meanwhile, Walz, whose speech spanned dad jokes and pointed attacks on his opponents, seasoned his remarks with midwestern dialect, adding a “damn well” here and a “come on” there. “Say it with me! We are not going back,” he said, starting a chant from the audience. “We’ve got 91 days. My god, that’s easy,” he said. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”The couch joke was madeWalz said his GOP rival, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, and Trump “are creepy and yes, they’re weird as hell”. He added that he “can’t wait to debate the guy”, speaking of Vance. Then, to sustained cheers and laughter, he made a reference to the baseless, but much-shared claim, that Vance admitted to having sex with a couch in his memoir. “That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up”.Stumping earlier today in Pennsylvania, Vance said: “I absolutely want to debate Tim Walz,” but not until after the Democratic convention, he said, because of the sudden change in the Democratic ticket. More

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      Gun reform advocates embrace a new tactic: running for office

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      After losing her son to gun violence, Shaundelle Brooks knew she had to do something big.Brooks’ son, Akilah DaSilva, was killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018 that left four dead and two wounded. His death launched Brooks into advocacy.While still mourning, Brooks fought for gun reform at the Tennessee legislature. Testifying in front of lawmakers, she evoked DaSilva in her demands for more restrictive gun laws. “I realized quickly that I had lost my child, but didn’t want to lose any more children or see another mom go through what I’ve been through,” she said. “I learned to channel my grief into action.”While Brooks felt empowered as an organizer, she also faced real challenges. Lawmakers shut down her proposals. Gun owners harassed her, claiming that if DaSilva had been carrying a gun, he would have been able to protect himself. Brooks would leave the statehouse in tears, heartbroken by the lack of accountability she witnessed. “I thought: ‘I have to do more than what I’m doing. I have to find ways to get through,’” Brooks said.So in February, Brooks announced her bid for a seat in the Tennessee state House of Representatives. On 1 August, she’ll be vying in the Democratic primary.View image in fullscreenPropelled by and fed up with what they see as a lack of progress when it comes to addressing America’s epidemic of gun violence, many activists like Brooks, who have felt the effects of gun violence first hand, are embracing a new tactic: running for elected office. For political organizers, this group represents a promising new cohort, whose members, if elected, may finally move the needle on gun reform.“There is a new wave of activists-turned-candidates, particularly among women and mothers, who are no longer willing to stand by,” Brooks said. “How can we not think about our kids?”Pinpointing the moments that led them to run for office comes easily to these candidates.For Emily Busch, who is running for a US congressional seat in Michigan, it was the November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school, where her son was a freshman, that propelled her to action. The event left four dead and seven injured. “My son ran for his life with 1,700 other kids,” Busch said. “It’s something that you never ever want to experience, which is why I’m running.”At a school board meeting held shortly after, Busch was appalled that masking received more attention than gun safety. “It wasn’t until the third or fourth person got up to speak that they actually addressed that four children had just been murdered two weeks before,” she recalled.Busch began organizing, urging neighbors and fellow parents to support gun reform legislation like universal background checks and safe storage requirements. She was then asked to run for state representative in a heavily Republican district in 2022 – but lost. Undeterred, her eyes are now set on Washington, as she readies for the Democratic primary on 6 August.For those who have lost loved ones, championing gun reform has served as a way to carry grief.Rhonda Hart, who is running in Texas’ 14th congressional district, “went full tilt into volunteer and activism” after her daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed. Vaughan was one of 10 people murdered in the 2018 Santa Fe high school shooting.“You can sit here and be sad 24/7 and twiddle your thumbs, or, for me, I needed to get up and do something,” Hart said. So, in 2019, Hart began working on a bill in her daughter’s name that focused on preventative measures, such as safe storage and gun safety educational programs.View image in fullscreenThe US House passed the Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safe Storage Act last session, but Hart, a disabled veteran, was surprised by the amount of resistance she faced along the way. Her own congressman, Republican Randy Weber – now her opponent – refused to support it, even after she and other advocates traveled to DC to meet with him after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting. Weber has a record of supporting pro-gun legislation, including bills that would increase police presence at schools and allow gun owners to carry a firearm on school grounds.An enraged Hart knew then and there that if she wanted effective legislation to be passed, she would have to do it herself. “If anybody has an axe to grind and a story to tell, it’s me,” Hart said. “We don’t want these people to go uncontested.”Brooks says gun violence survivors and their loved ones are in a unique position to convince others of the pressing need for reform.“I think we’re going to be more passionate because we’ve experienced it,” she said, emphasizing the growing need for “leaders who understand this issue on a personal level and who can bring authentic, passionate advocacy to the legislative process”.That same vision is driving progressive groups to find more candidates who are willing to run for office on gun violence platforms. Last February, nearly 50 new candidates gathered in Las Vegas with Demand a Seat, an initiative to train gun safety advocates to run for office and work on campaigns offered by advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. At the four-day boot camp, participants received mentorship from veteran politicians, training in the fundamentals of campaign building and guidance in how to effectively elevate a gun safety platform.The program capitalizes on a trend that gun safety advocates have been witnessing for several years. “Gun safety is actually good politics now, it’s not just good policy,” said Moms Demand Action’s executive director, Angela Ferrell-Zabala. “Folks [are] choosing to run and win on gun safety.”View image in fullscreenSince 2021, more than 250 volunteers from Everytown alone have been elected into office, and the organization has a 58%-win rate, said Ferrell-Zabala. And while a decade ago, half of congressional Democrats had A-ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA), today, that number is zero. Down-ballot races are especially important to this electoral strategy, with almost 95% of the program’s volunteers-turned-candidates running in state and local elections.Participants in the program – and gun reform candidates more broadly – share more than their experiences as gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors. They are also connected by gender and parenthood: the cohort is “overwhelmingly” made up of women and mothers, explained Ferrell-Zabala. “We intentionally aim to empower people who may never have thought they could run for office, like women and mothers – especially Black and brown survivors of gun violence,” she said.Members of the so-called “mass shooting generation” themselves are also entering races, taking inspiration from young progressives who won seats during the 2022 midterms. Most notable is Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first member of gen Z to be elected to US Congress after serving as national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the gun control advocacy group founded after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.Earlier this year, 19-year-old Navian Scarlett, a vocal gun safety organizer just two years out of high school, ran for school board in Frederick county, Maryland. While she lost her bid in April, Scarlett’s candidacy offered insight into how violence prevention policy is felt by youth on the ground.As an adolescent, she felt the ripples of gun violence on numerous occasions: first when members of her high school basketball team were shot and wounded on campus, and again when shots rang out at a prom after-party that her brother attended. Days after that party, her school ran an active shooter drill that she says traumatized the student body. “I witnessed students having breakdowns. Some of them were curled up with their knees to their chests rocking back and forth and crying,” she said. “It wasn’t as effective for students as [school leaders] may have thought.”For her, that disconnect speaks to the importance of having youth voices in the movement.In Nashville, Brooks says that when the the race catches up with her, she remembers why she is running in the first place.She’s proposing expanding background checks, striking down laws that allow gun owners carry without permits and elevating red flag laws, something she said could have saved her son. “Akilah could have been here,” she said, explaining that the man who killed him had a mental illness and had previously had his gun taken away.“The journey has been transformative. It has shown me that from immense loss can come a powerful drive to create a better world.” More

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      Past assassination attempts led to US gun reform. But not this time

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      In the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, the calls for stricter gun regulation came quickly. Senator Thomas Dodd proposed new legislation five days after the president’s death.Almost two decades later, the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan prompted swift demands for action, including restrictions on handguns.And though in both instances it would take years for lawmakers to move forward, both tragedies led to meaningful reform: bans on mail-order gun sales, restrictions on who can purchase weapons and federal background checks for all gun purchases.Political violence has long shaped the US gun control movement, but it appears little will change from this week.After the attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend, outcry over the easy access to guns in US has been relatively muted. There are no Republicans calling for tougher laws. There’s no national conversation about the toll of gun violence on American life.The biggest movements for gun control in US history can be traced to specific assassinations, said Andrew McKevitt, a history professor at Louisiana Tech University and the author of Gun Country, which looks at America’s relationship with firearms.“The calls for those things came in the immediate aftermath,” McKevitt said. “These are both kind of foundational moments for gun control in the United States and yet we haven’t seen anything in that regard in the last week.”View image in fullscreenAfter Kennedy’s death, Dodd urged action. It would take five years, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, but in 1968 lawmakers passed the Gun Control Act, banning mail-order gun sales and restricting who can purchase weapons.In 1981, Ronald Reagan was seriously injured in an assassination attempt alongside his press secretary, James Brady, who was shot in the head, as well as a Secret Service agent and police officer. In the following years, Brady and his wife, Sarah, became advocates for gun violence prevention and joined a non-profit that was eventually renamed in honor of the couple.They pulled in the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to champion gun safety legislation, said Christian Heyne, the chief officer of policy and programs at Brady, the organization. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which passed under Bill Clinton in 1993, was named for James.“It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t overnight. They had a series of votes over a series of years and not all of them were successful, but they were persistent,” Heyne said.In more recent years, as the US became plagued by increasingly horrifying mass shootings, the gun violence prevention movement has grown significantly, but progress at the federal level has been stymied. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, efforts by Democrats to pass new gun legislation, including a renewal of the assault weapons ban, were blocked by Republicans.The school shooting in Parkland, Florida, sparked a major youth movement and massive demonstrations across the US and renewed hope that Congress would take meaningful action. It did not, and instead, the National Rifle Association (NRA) said schools should improve safety and that teachers should be armed.The cultural and legal landscape has changed dramatically in the decades since the attacks on Kennedy and Reagan, McKevitt said, pointing to the 2004 expiration of a federal ban on assault weapons, which opened the floodgates for a market for the firearms and occurred as TV news showed American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan carrying similar weapons.US gun culture underwent rapid militarization, he said, and the industry aggressively marketed the expensive AR-15 and swiftly expanded. The “gasoline on the fire” was the election of Barack Obama, who the right portrayed as “coming for your guns”, McKevitt added.At the heart of the movement is the NRA, the powerful lobbying group that spent $31m to elect Trump in 2016. The NRA developed into what was for years a virtually unstoppable political force that could make or break the careers of Republican politicians.The group made guns a core of US culture wars and successfully pushed the narrative that “it takes a good guy with a gun” to “stop a bad guy with a gun”.The gun rights movement was able to achieve major legal victories, McKevitt said, including “stand your ground” laws and open carry legislation.Meanwhile, during the pandemic, Americans bought guns at record rates.“We’re living in an era where the gun rights movement won. The gun rights movement has had tremendous, dramatic, triumphant success over the last 40 years,” McKevitt said. “These legal triumphs, these political triumphs, have remade the landscape of guns in America.“And here we came mere inches from America’s rifle taking the life of the president who is the sort of great icon of the gun industry,” McKevitt said.McKevitt said Republicans were likely to remain resistant of any talk of gun safety laws, no matter the victim. And that Democrats were unlikely to want to push such a proposal in an election year.Heyne, whose mother died in a shooting, said he hoped the shooting in Pennsylvania would inspire some action.“President Trump now is a survivor of gun violence and I hope part of the process of what comes next is a real sincere thought about what it is that can prevent other people from experiencing what he’s experienced.”Still, he is frustrated by the lack of a national conversation around gun violence.“There is a dangerous normalization of gun violence in this country. We’re not having robust calls to action so we can prevent the next national tragedy like this. Until we’re willing to do something it almost certainly will happen again,” he said.“This assassination attempt was enabled by easy access to a military-style rifle and it was used precisely as it was designed,” he said. More

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      Trump is now a member of the mass shooting survivor’s club – will it change anything?

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      The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has put the former president in a category that hundreds of other Americans have been forced into in recent decades: the victim of a high-profile mass shooting.For those who have been at the scene of public shootings or lived through the media whirlwind that followed a loved one’s death to mass violence, the past week has felt like a “rinse and repeat” of more than a decade of this type of violence, said Christian Heyne, the chief officer of policy and programs at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after the former White House press secretary Jim Brady, who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.“Every time this type of gun violence happens, it dredges up a lot of trauma,” said Heyne, whose mother was killed and father was injured in a shooting rampage in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2005. In addition to Heyne’s mother, a police officer was killed in the attack, and five other people were injured.After Saturday’s shooting, Heyne was brought back to the day his mother was killed and his community was terrorized. He is troubled that more people now face the trauma he has lived with for nearly 20 years.“The thing that baffles me is that we can be in this cycle of rinse and repeat but we’re not tapping into a conversation about how we prevent the next shooting,” he added.For many like Heyne, Saturday’s shooting was a reminder of their own losses and a stark reminder that gun violence can touch anyone, including a presidential nominee surrounded by armed law enforcement. The policy solutions, they say, are the same they have asked for following every mass shooting tragedy.“The fact that a 20-year-old with an AR-15 was able to get that close to killing a previous head of state is the reason that we have to focus on the gun at the end of the day,” said David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives, a violence prevention group founded after 17 of his classmates were killed at their high school in Parkland, Florida.As the news of the Trump rally flooded television, one of Hogg’s first thoughts was of his mother, who he says is deeply affected by news of shootings. Then, he began calling out what he sees as the fallacy that more guns will ensure protection from mass shootings. “We’re not going to bulletproof our entire society,” he said.Now, he is looking forward with hope that the near-killing of the leader of the Republican party will push lawmakers to build the trust among themselves needed to pass gun policies at the state and federal levels.“The former president of the United States has heightened security and additional Secret Service, and this still happened. We need to change the conversation.“We have to have some semblance of trust between these major party political leaders,” Hogg continued. “Do I think Republicans are actually going to step up to the plate and do something? I don’t think so. But I hope so after the crown jewel of their movement was threatened.”The only similarity Hogg saw between the Parkland shooting and Trump’s assassination attempt was the deluge of conspiracies, speculation and misinformation that have become commonplace following high-profile shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. “This is America, people love conspiracy theories in general,” he said.“There’s this range of public outcry that we continue to live through,” echoed Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son Daniel was one of 26 people killed in the 2012 tragedy in Connecticut. “There’s sympathy, empathy, outrage and anger. There’s sadness, there’s horror and fear and then conjecture.”After 12 years of advocacy through Sandy Hook Promise, the organization he co-founded with Nicole Hockley another parent whose child was killed in the attack, Barden says he has grown used to the intense news cycle that follows high-profile shootings. He has found a way to move past the ugliest parts of the post-mass shooting news cycle, he said, to focus on spreading awareness about identifying the warning signs and behaviors that often precede mass public violence.“I spend all of my intelligence and mental capital on getting people to know the signs and giving them the tools to make an intervention on themselves or somebody else,” he said.“I think this could be – depending on how this unfolds – a catalyst moment,” Barden said of the rally shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday. “There’s an opportunity for folks to understand that this doesn’t have to be our way of life.” More

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      Unfortunately, gun violence – against Trump or anyone else – is all too American | Rebecca Solnit

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      “Political violence is unacceptable and has no place in this country,” said Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, and “political violence has absolutely no place in this country”, insisted California congresswoman Barbara Lee, while President Joe Biden stated, “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America.”“As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society,” affirmed Nancy Pelosi, referencing the attacker who broke into her home in 2022 to kidnap her and, in her absence, seriously injured her husband. “There is no place for political violence in this country, period,” said Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a kidnapping plot by far-right militiamen in 2020 who intended to make her the centerpiece of a show trial.Dozens of others reached for versions of this “no place in America” declaration, and I wondered if “no place” meant something like when Jesus was born in a stable because, according to the Gospel of Luke, “there was no place for them in the inn.” That is, the United States is full to overflowing of violence of many kinds and afflicted with many enthusiasts for violence and the weapons with which it is most often fatally inflicted.All this came in the wake of an event in Pennsylvania in which the ear of an elderly man was grazed by a bullet fired by a young man with a semi-automatic weapon. One bystander died of a bullet to the head and two others were seriously injured. Later that night four people were killed in a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama, and nine others wounded by another gunman. Four more people were killed in a home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in yet another shooting Sunday, and three people were shot in Charleston, South Carolina, non-fatally. None of them were running for president, so these other stories weren’t major news.You could drop in dozens of local news stories of shootings like that any weekend in this country over the past decade years, if it wasn’t the kind of week in which the carnage was so immense it became a major news story, as when an 18-year-old gunman murdered 19 elementary-school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, in May of 2022, while heavily armed police stood by. Every day, on average, 327 Americans are shot and 117 die of the injuries, according to one gun-control-advocacy site.On Wednesday a white policeman shot and killed a Black shoplifter reportedly suffering from mental health issues in Charlotte, North Carolina. The United States is drenched in violence, riddled with violence, rotten with violence. There is room for violence in this country founded on slavery and the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans. There has always been epidemic violence against women in this country. But a lot of recent violence has been cultivated as an asset for rightwing politicians and a cash crop for gun manufacturers.The day the Black shoplifter died, I spoke at a campaign launch for a first time San Francisco candidate. So did the activist Cleve Jones, who talked about Harvey Milk. In the late 1970s Jones was a young intern for and friend of Milk, the out gay politician whose election to San Francisco’s board of supervisors was a watershed moment in queer history. On the morning of 27 November 1978, he heard that Milk’s ally, Mayor George Moscone, had been shot and rushed to City Hall, where he saw thensupervisor Dianne Feinstein rush past him, one sleeve and hand stained with blood. It was Milk’s blood from her attempt to take his pulse when she found him shot, and moments later he saw his friend lying dead of five bullets fired at close range. Along with the mayor, he had been assassinated by a disgruntled former supervisor, the rightwinger and ex-cop Dan White.Dianne Feinstein became mayor, then ran for the US senate, and after winning she introduced the 1994 federal assault rifle ban that passed but which Republicans allowed to lapse a decade later. Democrats have long tried to institute gun control laws; Republicans have largely tried to prevent or overturn them. In Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old man climbed onto a roof Saturday, anyone over 18 can buy a semi-automatic like the one he wielded without a waiting period, and private sales don’t require background checks. It has in recent years become an open-carry state, as have the majority of states in this country.One person pulled the trigger; thousands of elected officials, lobbyists, and gun industry employees worked to make it possible for him to do so. To make more room for violence in America.The elderly man – and yeah, of course I’m talking about Donald Trump – whose ear was grazed had instigated a violent assault on Congress in which hundreds of defenders of the institution and process of democracy were injured, sprayed with bear mace, stabbed with American flags, crushed in a door, battered with barricades, and he has long encouraged political violence.His associate in trying to steal the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani, was found liable for spreading lies that encouraged Trump supporters to target two Black women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who had been ordinary Georgia election workers. The resultant threats, racial slurs, and menacing appearances that forced Freeman to sell her home and both to go into hiding. A jury awarded them $148m in compensatory and punitive damages late last year.“How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump” was the headline of a report earlier this year, and a 2020 report by ABC News “identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.” There is room for violence in America. Some politicians have long tried to make more room for it. One of them escaped a bullet on Saturday. A lot of other Americans have not been so lucky.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More