Washington, May 29: Days after the mass shooting in a Texas school, Vice President Kamala Harris decried the “epidemic of hate” and made a plea for ban on assault weapons.
Speaking at a service for one of the victims of the Buffalo shooting on Saturday, Harris said, “There’s a through line, what happened here in Buffalo, in Texas, in Atlanta, in Orlando, what happened at the synagogues.
“And so this is a moment that requires all good people, all God-loving people, to stand up and say, ‘We will not stand for this. Enough is enough,’ we will come together based on what we all know we have in common, and we will not let those people who are motivated by hate separate us or make us feel fear.
According to BBC, she was attending the funeral of Ruth Whitfield, 86, killed in a supermarket in Buffalo on May 14, 10 days before the attack in Texas.
She said, “The pain that this family is feeling right now, and the nine other families here in Buffalo, I cannot even begin to express our collective pain as a nation for what you are feeling in such an extreme way.
“To not only lose someone that you love, but through an act of extreme violence and hate. And I do believe that our nation right now is experiencing an epidemic of hate.”
Speaking on assault weapons, the Vice President asked the crowd: “Do you know what an assault weapon is?” “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.”
The 18-year-old gunman, who killed 19 students and their two teachers of a Texas primary school, had two AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles. The shooter, Salvador Ramos, was eventually shot and killed by law enforcement agencies. After he was shot dead, police found as many as 1,657 rounds of ammunition and 60 magazines in his possession, BBC reported.
Harris said, “No one should be made to fight alone. We are stronger than those who would try to hurt us think that we are.
“That we are strong, we are strong in our faith, we are strong in our belief about what is right, and our determination to act to insure that we protect all those who deserve to be protected, that we see all those who deserve to be seen, that we hear the voices of those people, and that we rise up in solidarity to speak out against this. And to speak to our better angels.”
(UNI)
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