Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday morning slammed GOP lawmakers’ fearmongering over efforts to curb gun violence through reforms on firearm purchases.
During an interview on CBS “This Morning,” Harris asserted that after the series of shootings in the Atlanta area in Georgia and in Boulder, Colorado last week and this week that left 18 people dead, the notion of tighter background checks shouldn’t be a divisive issue.
“I believe it is possible–it has to be possible–that people agree that these slaughters have to stop,” the vice president said.
Harris pushed back against the right-wing narrative of a controlling government that seeks to strip people of their firearms.
“Stop pushing the false choice that this means everybody’s trying to come after your guns,” she said. “That is not what we’re talking about.”
Several GOP lawmakers have been wringing their hands over legislation aiming to expand background checks, particularly in recent days following the shootings.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told CNN the day after the Boulder attack that those massacres are “used” as “an excuse to further erode Second Amendment rights.”
“I now believe that their ultimate goal is to abolish our rights,” she said.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on gun violence on Tuesday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) tried to compare gun control to imaginary laws on impaired driving that ban sober drivers.
“I’m not trying to perfectly equate these two, but we have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people. We ought to combat that too,” he said. “But I think what a lot of people on my side are saying is we ought not to get rid of all the sober drivers.”
(The Louisiana Republican apparently did not take into account the fact that the government does place many restrictions on driving, especially drunk driving.)
On the other hand, a handful of Republicans such as Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) have expressed support for some form of expansion on background checks, though they’ve rejected the robust measures in the House’s legislation that passed recently.
