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By Patrick Svitek
(c) 2024 , The Washington Post
With two months left in the presidential race, former president Donald Trump would prefer to campaign on issues such as inflation and immigration. Vice President Kamala Harris has been centering her campaign on expanding economic opportunity, while seeking to keep abortion rights as a top contrast with Trump.
But a school shooting in the battleground state of Georgia has thrust the issue of gun violence back into the spotlight, elevating – at least for now – a topic that had not been front and center in the matchup.
The immediate political reaction was familiar, signaling dim prospects for any near-term changes to gun laws. But gun-control advocates said the proximity to the election could focus candidates and voters more urgently on the issue.
“I think in some ways it is a familiar reaction, but also in some ways there’s a lot of differences,” said Monisha Henley, senior vice president of government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, which has endorsed Harris. “We are in a presidential election, so that is an immediate difference. Voters are making their decisions right now on who they think will best represent them up and down the ballot.”
Henley also pointed to the state level, saying she was encouraged by a bipartisan Georgia legislative committee that met Thursday morning to consider gun storage initiatives. The meeting was previously scheduled.
In the hours after Wednesday’s shooting, which killed four people and injured at least nine others, Democrats lamented the regularity of such tragedies and called for new gun restrictions. Republicans focused on portraying the shooting as an act of evil and sidestepped – or outright rejected – questions about policy.
Harris was campaigning in New Hampshire hours after the shooting and began her event by addressing it, at one point telling the crowd she was “going off-script” to speak further about it.
“Our kids are sitting in a classroom where they should be fulfilling their God-given potential, and some part of their big, beautiful brain is concerned about a shooter busting through the door of their classroom. It does not have to be this way,” she said.
“This is one of the many issues that is at stake in this election,” she added.
Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, spoke about the Georgia shooting at multiple campaign stops in Pennsylvania on Thursday. The former high school teacher said he’s tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers.
“As a teacher and as a student and as a dad, I loved back-to-school season – time of hope, excitement. Now for those kids, it’ll always be a time of sheer terror, and that’ll be a memory that they’ll hold forever,” he said at an evening rally in Erie, Pa.
“It’s a reminder in the rest of the country – we’ve got work to do. And I, for one, am sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers rather than actually doing something,” Walz said.
President Joe Biden, in a statement on the shooting, called on Republicans in Congress to “finally say ‘enough is enough’” and work with Democrats to pass a list of proposals, including an assault-weapons ban. Officials have said the gunman used an “AR-platform-style weapon.”
Biden sought to keep the shooting in the national conversation Thursday during a trip to Wisconsin.
“As a nation, we cannot continue to accept the carnage of gun violence,” he said at an event to announce billions of dollars for electricity in rural America. “I’m a gun owner. I believe strongly in the amendment, but we need more than thoughts and prayers.”
Trump’s initial comments on the shooting did not mention gun violence. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump referred to the shooting as a “tragic event” and said the victims were “taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster” – a reference to the 14-year-old suspect.
Trump also did not mention gun violence when asked about the shooting during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Wednesday night. Trump instead used a question about the shooting to reiterate his broader campaign message that he is the best candidate to restore peace at home and abroad.
“It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons, and we’re going to make it better,” Trump said. “We’re going to heal our world.”
The shooting has come at a time when violent crime has declined nationally, a fact that Democrats have highlighted as Trump portrays Biden and Harris as soft on criminals.
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, declined to entertain a reporter’s question at a news conference about possible policy response to the shooting. Kemp said Georgia has “done a tremendous amount on school safety, but today is not the day for politics or policy.”
Kemp is a crucial ally for Trump in Georgia. Trump has recently sought to patch up his relationship with Kemp after a long-running feud sparked by Kemp’s refusal to help with overturning Trump’s 2020 reelection loss in Georgia.
The state looms large in the November election, especially since Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee. In The Washington Post’s polling average across seven battleground states, Georgia has seen the second-largest shift away from Trump since Biden ended his reelection bid in July.
Harris and Walz went on a bus tour of south Georgia last week, looking to show their commitment to contesting smaller communities outside the vote-rich Atlanta area.
It remains to be seen whether Wednesday’s shooting will change how the state’s voters think about gun violence in regard to the November election.
A Quinnipiac University poll of Georgia, conducted from May 30 to June 3, found only 4 percent of voters said gun violence was the most important issue in deciding who they will vote for in the presidential contest. That issue was far behind the economy (29 percent) and “preserving democracy” (23 percent).
Aneesa McMillan, a spokeswoman for the gun-control group Giffords, which has also endorsed Harris, said she sees plenty of “political momentum” for the cause in polling that the organization has conducted among battleground state voters. She said it is a “top-of-mind issue that is consistently brought up” by certain voting blocs, including young voters who have “come of age” doing school shooting drills in the classroom.
Both Harris and Trump have extensive records on gun violence.
In 2022, Biden signed into law a bipartisan gun-control measure that was the most significant law of its kind in the past three decades. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provided funding for mental health services and school security initiatives, while expanding criminal background checks for some gun buyers, among other things.
Harris oversees the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an appointment that Biden gave her about a year ago. At her first campaign event after Biden dropped out, Harris reiterated her support for “red flag laws, universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban.”
In picking Walz – a veteran and hunter – Harris found a running mate who could tap into personal experience to address gun violence. Walz, in his Democratic National Convention speech, said he “know[s] guns.”
“I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I got the trophies to prove it,” Walz said. “But I’m also a dad. I believe in the Second Amendment. But I also believe our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.”
Trump, meanwhile, has pitched himself as “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House” and repeatedly courted the National Rifle Association. Addressing the NRA this year, Trump boasted that as president he resisted “great pressure” to change gun laws.
“We did nothing,” Trump said. “We didn’t yield.”
After a January school shooting in Iowa, Trump called it a “very terrible thing” but added, “We have to get over it.”
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Dylan Wells and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.
