After five decades in politics, President Joe Biden on Sunday announced his stunning decision to drop out of the 2024 race for the White House — and his chosen successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, has already made gun violence a key plank of her campaign. At her first rally on Tuesday, she expressed support for policies long advocated by gun reform groups: “We, who believe that every person should have the freedom to live safe from the terror of gun violence, will finally pass red flag laws, universal background checks, and an assault weapons ban.” In her launch video, Harris framed her candidacy thematically around protecting freedom, including “the freedom to be safe from gun violence”; during a speech to the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday, she told the crowd, “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”
The response to Harris’s candidacy has been frenetic (especially online), including in the gun sphere. As The Trace’s Chip Brownlee reported this week, groups on both sides of the gun debate have weighed in on Harris’s presidential bid. Prominent gun violence prevention groups have thrown their weight behind her; March for Our Lives, a youth-led group founded by survivors of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, gave Harris its first-ever political endorsement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, groups on the other side of the gun debate have panned Harris’s candidacy.
The reactions reflect her work on gun issues over more than two decades in politics. Harris has taken a leading role in the Biden administration’s work on gun violence, overseeing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and helping roll out a plan to crack down on unlicensed gun dealers. But for Harris, gun violence was a central issue from the start. As Brownlee reports, during her first campaign to be San Francisco’s top prosecutor in 2003, she promised to take a tougher tack on gun crimes, and has consistently pushed for stricter gun regulations since. However, Harris has also said she supports responsible firearm ownership. “We’re not trying to take everybody’s guns away,” she told the Atlanta Voice in June. “It’s about reasonable gun safety.”
Harris has been in the running for less than a week, and it’s impossible to say how her record and campaign stances on guns would translate into White House tenure. But there are hints about how Harris might approach the issue. U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler, a California Democrat and longtime adviser and friend to Harris, described the vice president’s broad view of government to Vox: “She thinks about policy and law not from a place of the words on a page, but the ways in which those words impact the lives of everyday people.”
That view was echoed in Harris’s comments on gun violence prevention in her interview with the Atlanta Voice. “We need to help people get to a place of productive healing of their trauma,” Harris said. “The trauma is the injury that’s invisible to the eye, but can be lifelong if it’s not addressed and healed. So that’s about diagnosis and treatment of trauma and encouraging folks to know that it’s OK to talk about it. We have to let people know that it’s a sign of strength.”
From The Trace
A roundup of stories from our team.
Kamala Harris’s Record on Guns
Groups on both sides of the gun debate have weighed in on Harris’s presidential bid. The reactions reflect her work on gun issues over 20-plus years in politics.
He Fatally Shot a White Man, Claiming Self Defense. Now He’s Charged With Murder.
The trial of Maurice Byrd, a Black veteran, will test “stand your ground” in Pennsylvania. Even as self-defense laws proliferate nationwide, few shootings are deemed justifiable — especially when the shooter is Black.
Gun Violence Prevention Services Can’t Reach Everyone. Telehealth Could Help.
Remote care can successfully treat a bevy of health issues. A new study shows its potential for gun violence prevention, too.
ICYMI: In Chicago, ShotSpotter Sparks a Political Power Struggle
The fight over the gunshot detection technology has escalated between the mayor and a group of alderpeople, who have tried to block its removal.
What to Know This Week
Adrian Gonzales, a former school police officer for Uvalde, Texas, pleaded not guilty to charges that he abandoned and failed to protect children in connection with his role in the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the attack. Former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was arrested on the same charges last month, has also pleaded not guilty. [ABC/Associated Press]
The family of Sonya Massey, whom an Illinois sheriff’s deputy shot and killed in her Springfield home after she called 911, said at a news conference this week that police initially tried to cover up the killing. Police audio reveals that someone on the scene the night of Massey’s death told a dispatcher that her fatal wound was “self-inflicted.” Records show that the deputy, who has since been fired and charged with murder, had been employed by six central Illinois law enforcement agencies since 2020. [The Guardian/NBC/The 19th]
An internal Army report found a “series of failures” in the handling of the reservist who killed 18 people in a gun rampage in Lewiston, Maine, last October. The report concluded that his unit had failed to conduct a merited investigation after the shooter’s release from a psychiatric facility three months before the massacre; it also found that local police could have prevented the shooting had they “fully executed” a health and welfare check on the shooter in September 2023. [NBC]
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle stepped down from her post, following bipartisan calls for her resignation over the agency’s handling of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Though both Democrats and Republicans agitated for Cheatle’s departure, the response to the rally shooting has been markedly partisan: The GOP and gun rights advocates have largely blamed security lapses, while Democrats have blamed insufficient gun regulations. [The Washington Post/The Wall Street Journal]
Mayor Brandon Scott has claimed that Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy was an integral contributor to the city’s steep decline in homicides this year. He and other proponents view the strategy as an alternative to sending people to prison — but some who have seen the program in action are more cynical. What does the data say? [Baltimore Brew and The Garrison Project]
South Los Angeles is home to the highest levels of gun violence in the county — and the trauma of frequent shootings can be profoundly damaging to the area’s kids. To help, the City Attorney’s Office and the LAPD’s community policing bureau have partnered with local organizations to provide mental health support, crisis response, and other services to families touched by gun violence. [The Guardian]
In Memoriam
Chad Dillon, 33, rose to prominence on something of a gambit: In 2020, as many eateries struggled to operate amid pandemic lockdown restrictions, he opened his first restaurant, The Boiler Seafood and Crab Boil, in Buckhead, Atlanta. It was the first Black-owned seafood restaurant in the city — and it was a success from the get-go. Dillon had since opened several other establishments in the Atlanta area, including with rapper Lil Baby; he was working on opening another restaurant, friends said, when he was shot and killed near the site this week. His business ventures began while he was studying business at Howard University, Dillon told Ebony last year, when he started a small car rental service. He had a strong work ethic, and was known for his philanthropy: Dillon started the Venturing Outside Foundation to help youth and formerly incarcerated people develop entrepreneurial skills, donating start-up funds to those he mentored. His employees described him as a caring boss: “When I was down bad, I needed someone to help me, he was that shoulder,” one said. Another added: “He’d give you the shirt off his back.”
We Recommend
Three Years of a Family’s Grief and Healing After a Fatal Police Shooting
“Photographer Michael Indriolo documents an East Cleveland family’s search for peace after the 2021 police shooting of their 19-year-old brother.” [The Marshall Project]
Pull Quote
“We don’t need our traumatized children growing up to hurt people because society ignored their pain.”
— Lawanda Hawkins, co-founder of Justice for Murdered Children, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that works regularly with an outreach team run through a partnership between the city and local organizations, to The Guardian
