Vice President Kamala Harris Promotes Federal Gun Legislation After Monterey Park Shooting

Vice President Kamala Harris attended a memorial service in honor of the victims of the January 21 mass shooting in Monterey Park, California.

Eleven people were killed and nine remain injured. The massacre took place at Monterey Park’s Star Ballroom Dance Studio and was allegedly perpetrated by gunman Huu Can Tran, a seventy-two year old man who had given free dance lessons to visitors in the past.

 

While Harris, a former California senator, mentioned her state’s leadership on the issue of gun safety, she stressed that gun violence is a nationwide epidemic and that Congress “must act” to address the “estimated forty mass killings” this year already.

“Tragically, we keep saying the same things,” she added.

Harris promoted a “uniform’ approach across the United States for gun safety, implying that the current decentralized, state-by-state policies are ineffective at controlling America’s gun violence epidemic.

California has faced two additional mass shootings since the Monterey Park massacre.

In Half Moon Bay, California, seven were shot dead by an agricultural worker on Jan 23. Just hours later, another was killed and seven others were injured during a mass shooting in nearby Oakland California.

While Harris and the Biden administration publicly support federal gun legislation, it remains unclear what efforts on this front are politically viable.

Following last year’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, mild bipartisan gun legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in June.

Democrats, falling short of the needed sixty-seat majority in the Senate to pass non-budgetary legislation, were forced to negotiate away many of their central gun control priorities.

Republicans have since taken control of the House of Representatives and have shown little interest in considering stricter gun legislation.