Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a ban on assault weapons after the horrific mass shootings at an elementary school in Texas and a supermarket in Buffalo, saying the arms have “no place in a civil society.
“On the issue of gun violence, I will say, as I’ve said countless times, we are not sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. You know, we’re not looking for a vaccine,” Harris told reporters Saturday in Buffalo, where she attended a funeral for one of the 10 people killed in the May 14 massacre there.
“We know what works on this. It includes, let’s have an assault weapons ban,” she said.
“You know what an assault weapon is? You know how an assault weapon was designed?” Harris said. “It was designed for a specific purpose – to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war with no place, no place in a civil society.”
AR-15-style assault weapons were used by both Payton Gendron when he opened fire on a Tops Friendly Market, killing 10 black customers, and Salvador Ramos in Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School in Texas that killed 19 students and two teachers.
Harris spoke at the funeral for Ruth Whitfield, who at 86 was the oldest of Gendron’s victims.
The vice president recalled the number of recent mass shootings that have rocked the nation and said, “Enough is enough.
“There’s a through line to what happened here in Buffalo, in Texas, in Atlanta, in Orlando, what happened at the synagogues, and so this is a moment that requires all good people, all God-loving people, to stand up and say, ‘We will not stand for this,’” Harris said at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, referring to a string of mass shootings in the US.
Congress passed a law banning assault weapons in 1994 during the Clinton administration, but former President George W. Bush allowed the law to expire in 2004.
