Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) declared Monday that Congress ought to follow the example of Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who spoke out for gun control after last Wednesday’s shooting.
“It’s time for Congress to have the same courage and compassion as Emma Gonzalez and the parents, students, and faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It’s time to stand up to the gun lobby,” Harris tweeted.
In her speech at a gun control rally on Saturday, Gonzalez accused President Donald Trump of being bought by the National Rifle Association (NRA). After a tearful introduction, she launched into a set of talking points familiar from gun control campaigns nationwide.
CNN posted a transcript of her remarks, a portion of which follows:
Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.
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Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn’t had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.
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We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He [the shooter] would not have harmed that many students with a knife.
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If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.
You want to know something? It doesn’t matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars.
Harris’s hashtag, “#WeCallBS,” refers to a refrain at the end of Gonzalez’s speech.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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