Mere days before at least 22 people were shot at a Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City, former President Donald Trump took the stage at a National Rifle Association gun show in Pennsylvania, promising to be the “best friend” of Second Amendment absolutists should he regain the presidency. “There was great pressure on me, having to do with guns,” Trump said about his time in the White House. “We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”
Republican leaders have a tendency to frame this ongoing violence in passive terms—a day “that was supposed to be triumphant has turned into tragedy,” Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt said Wednesday afternoon. But this endless cycle, this pile-up of overlapping tragic anniversaries, is not a natural disaster visiting communities across the country; it is what happens when officials do “nothing” to prevent it, as Trump boasted last Friday. “We cannot allow this to be normal,” the Chiefs’ Justin Reid wrote Wednesday. “I pray our leaders enact real solutions so our kids’ kids won’t know this violence.”
The gun safety movement has made significant progress in recent years—particularly with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, which President Joe Biden signed into law after the Uvalde school shooting. “The momentum is there,” as Emma Brown, executive director of the gun reform group Giffords, told me recently. But, as Brown pointed out, there remains a “big gulf” between current gun policy and the stronger regulations most Americans support, thanks to the “decades-long hold” the gun lobby and manufacturers have had on state and federal lawmakers.
That grip so far has stood in the way of more robust reforms at the federal level and created a dangerous patchwork of gun laws at the state level—with some, like Illinois and California, enacting tougher restrictions and others, like Missouri, undermining them with looser laws. And while conservatives are quick to hold up violence in places like Chicago as evidence gun control does not work, studies have found that areas with weaker gun laws tend to have higher rates of gun deaths. Missouri, which one Democratic state legislator described Wednesday as a “petri dish for terrible gun laws,” has some of the weakest regulations in the country and some of the highest numbers of gun deaths and homicide rates. Kansas City, the site of Wednesday’s mass shooting, had the seventh-highest homicide rate among major American cities last year.
Some of the pressure Trump was referring to in his remarks last week came after the Parkland school shooting, the sixth anniversary of which was being observed Wednesday when gunfire erupted at the Chiefs parade. “We had an entirely different interview that we were going to do here, just to talk about some of the work that you guys are doing on Capitol Hill trying to bring about awareness and change, and you see this happening as you were here visiting,” CNN’s Kate Bolduan told the parents of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver. “What is on your mind as you’re watching this?”
“Not surprised at all,” Oliver’s father, Manuel, replied. “It never stops.”
Details about the parade incident were still coming out Thursday, but Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said that the preliminary investigation indicated the event “appeared to be a dispute between several people that ended in gunfire.” Caught in the crossfire: Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a Kansas City radio DJ and mother who died in the shooting, and at least nine children who were among the wounded in the incident.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Brown wrote Wednesday. But it will be, as long as there are leaders in this country who pride themselves on doing “nothing” in the face of this senseless violence. “What are we waiting for? What else do we need to see? How many more families need to be torn apart?” Biden said in a statement Wednesday. “It is time to act.”
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