Acevedo speaks out against the silence on gun violence
Police Chief Art Acevedo took to Twitter on Sunday to condemn silence on gun violence one week after a gunman shot into a Las Vegas country music festival crowd, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more.
“When will we stand up and say enough?” he wrote, sharing a Washington Post story profiling the Las Vegas victims. “On this Sabbath Sunday I can say I’ve spoken out against gun violence, can you? If not now, then when?”
He followed that tweet with another: “To those that say it is too soon, I say it’s too late. We’ve failed thousands of families, of all ages, races and faith. Stand up and be heard.”
Acevedo, who joined HPD in November, has been for many years a vocal advocate for stricter gun control. He called gun violence a “health epidemic” in September.
He has pushed for universal background checks for firearm buyers and closing the so-called gun-show loophole.
The National Rifle Association, the nation’s largest gun lobby, and most Republicans have stood firmly in recent years against stricter gun regulations, even as one mass shooting after another horrified the nation. They blocked background check legislation after the shooting deaths of elementary school children in Connecticut in 2012, and took no action despite intense pressure from Democrats, including a House floor sit-in, after last year’s bloodbath at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Even gunfire that left House Majority Whip Steve Scalise near death at a baseball practice this year didn’t change the equation.
But Thursday the NRA joined the Trump administration and top congressional Republicans in a swift embrace of a restriction on Americans’ guns, though a narrow one: to regulate the “bump stock” devices the Las Vegas shooter apparently used to horrifically lethal effect.