Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during an event at Southwest Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas Monday, April 15, 2024.
Monday, April 15, 2024 | 4:45 p.m.
Vice President Kamala Harris recalled visiting with a teenager who expressed not liking to attend their fifth-period class.
The reason? If the school was locked down for an active-shooter situation, the classroom didn’t have a closet where the students could hide.
Harris relayed this story Monday during an appearance at Southwest Career Technical Academy in Las Vegas to discuss the epidemic of gun violence and steps to prevent it. This was the fourth time Harris has visited Las Vegas — home of the deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history in 2017 — this year.
“The idea that our children and our young people are sitting in a classroom where they are supposed to be enjoying the wonders of the world and exploring with enthusiasm all there is to learn, and part of their mind is concerned that someone will bust into the classroom (is tragic),” Harris said during a roundtable discussion with Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the executive director of Moms Demand Action, and teenage actor Xochitl Gomez.
Harris asked the crowd of high school students how many of them have had an active-shooter drill. Many raised their hands.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said in a somber voice, and then repeated, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
She touted the 2022 bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which paved the way for the Biden administration last week to announce new regulations from the Department of Justice to expand background checks for gun purchases.
The rule aims to close a loophole that has allowed tens of thousands of guns to be sold every year by unlicensed dealers who do not perform background checks to ensure the potential buyer is not legally prohibited from having a firearm. Gun rights groups are expected to fight the expanded background checks in court.
It’s the administration’s latest effort to combat gun violence. But in a contentious election year, it’s also an effort to show voters — especially younger ones for whom gun violence deeply resonates — that the White House is trying to stop gun deaths.
“Where do the bad guys go to get their guns? The place where nobody will check their background,” Harris said.
Harris, who leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, last month visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where on Feb. 14, 2018, a mass shooting took the lives of 14 students and three staff members. The gun violence office was founded by the administration last fall to find a way around congressional inaction on stronger gun control laws, officials said.
The scene at the Florida school left a lasting impression, the vice president said. There was still blood in the hallways, sheets of homework around the classroom, desks unturned and backpacks still in place, she said.
“We have within our grasp, within our means, things we can do to mitigate things. I don’t have to tell Nevada this,” she said in referencing the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting on the Strip.
Harris said earlier Monday she met with UNLV students who were sheltered in place Dec. 6 during an active shooter episode on campus. Three professors were killed that afternoon, and another severely wounded.
One of the students hiding in fear of their life was a UNLV freshman who recently had graduated from Southwest Tech, her brother, Raiyan Shafique, told the crowd when introducing Harris.
“My heart dropped as I thought to myself, ‘How is this happening?’ ” he said. He later added, “(Harris) understands the safety of our schools isn’t a political issue; it’s a moral responsibility.”
Harris said the leading cause of death for children in the United States was gun violence, and “not car accidents; not some form of cancer.”
But she said strides were being made and “we can put into place smart rules to reduce gun violence.”
The vice president spoke about safe storage of guns, saying that all gun owners should feel a responsibility to secure their weapons to prevent children and young people from accessing them.
She stated that 75% of school shootings resulted from an unsecured gun. Harris said storing ammunition separately from guns was part of being a responsible gun owner.
U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., whose congressional district includes the Strip and UNLV, told the crowd that she is a gun owner who practices gun safety. “Thoughts and prayers are good, but they don’t stop the violence,” Titus said.
Harris also encouraged young people to pursue a career in mental health — one of many pieces of advice she gave to the room full of young students at the end of her discussion.
“We still have so much more work to do to make sure mental health services are able to meet the demand,” Harris said, then praising Gen Z’s willingness to discuss mental health. The oldest members of Gen Z are old enough to vote.
Harris spent about six hours in Las Vegas on Monday. She also visited Bottega Exchange, a co-working space in southwest Las Vegas to talk about women’s productive rights.
Harris told her audience that the state of abortion in the United States was not about politics or ideology. “This is about the fact that far too many people are suffering and should not,” she said.
Titus also attended this event and predicted that other forms ofbirth control would be next in the line of women’s rights jeopardized. She also said former President Donald Trump was “dancing around the issue” and that his comments about leaving abortion rights to the states was merely an excuse to win votes in November.
Arizona state Sen. Eva Burch also spoke, reminding the audience of when she announced her abortion as a way of encouraging dialogue on the issue.
“As you heard last week, thanks to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn Roe, the Arizona Supreme Court rolled the clock back 160 years to uphold a total abortion ban that makes no exceptions at all, except to save the life of the mother, which we all know is no real exception at all,” Burch said. “This ban from 1864 was drafted when women couldn’t vote when they couldn’t have a bank account couldn’t marry outside their race. And when the age of consent for sex was 10 years old.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
