VP Pushes Assault Weapons Ban Just Hours After School Shooting
There are plenty of traits that we look to avoid in our elected officials, but we certainly don’t always get it right.
We would like to think that we suffer no liars, and that we don’t elect folks who are in it of the money or the power. We hope that our public servants will be free of vices and that they will remember who they work for.
And, perhaps one of the more important characteristics of our elected officials, is their ability to avoid knee-jerk reactions to real-time events. We need them to steer the ship slowly and methodically, as opposed to frantically, due to the very real risk of political whiplash.
Vice President Kamala Harris did not get the memo, apparently.
Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ban on “assault weapons” on Saturday after she spoke at the funeral of a woman killed in the Buffalo, New York grocery store mass shooting earlier this month.
She called the firearm a “weapon of war” that has “no place in civil society.”
Harris’ choice of analogies was interesting.
“We are not sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. You know, we’re not looking for a vaccine. We know what works on this,” she told reporters outside of Air Force Two at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, referring to the series of mass shootings that have plagued the U.S. “Let’s have an assault weapons ban.”
Harris also suggested that the type of gun was a problem, which is a notion that is frequently refuted by experts.
She told reporters before boarding the plane, “You know what an assault weapon is? You know how an assault weapon was designed? 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.”
This knee-jerk reaction is common among Democrats, certainly, and Harris’ inability to avoid this folly may affect her political future.
