Tim Walz has said he’s “sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers” following the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, which left four dead.
Walz, who was named as Kamala Harris’ running mate in the race for the White House in August, spoke about the Wednesday (4 September) shooting at a campaign rally at the Highmark Amphitheater in Erie, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
He told his supporters: “We believe in the freedom to send our kids to school without being shot dead in the hall.”
“The news cycle moves on within a day,” he commented of the incident, adding that kids had returned to school feeling excited and “now we have four dead”.
Yes. We need full societal fixes. But gun control is part of that.
14 year olds have no business having unsupervised access to weapons. We need better storage laws. We need better red flag laws, national licensing laws so that everyone with a gun has to take a basic safety course, and we need universal background checks where ALL branches of law enforcement share info with each other.
Start there and you will significantly cut gun violence while we spin up the mental health infrastructure to deal with the rest. Which is going to take time. And money. Neither of which the current government wants to spend.
While I think all of those laws make good sense. I don’t think they will actually reduce gun violence much. Most of them people will just ignore like they do the advice to store guns better. The law will only punish people after the fact. And everyone else will always think that it will never happen to them.
And the system fails to protect people with straight up restraining orders against others. It won’t be able to do much with all the other things you mention. So focusing on those, and of course never achieving them, is just the carrot on a stick the dems use to get the voters out. If they weren’t a political focus they would actually have a better chance of happening.