In interview, Harris touts bold changes to come on immigration, guns, equity
On two of the hottest issues facing the nation right now — the flow of migrants at the southern border and the two mass shootings that killed 18 people in a matter of a week — Vice President Kamala Harris suggested in an interview Friday the Biden administration will take bold action.
Harris, in a conversation with Hearst Connecticut Media during her visit to Connecticut, stopped short of offering specifics, instead outlining the path forward the administration could take.
On racial and economic equity, exposed all the more a national rift by the coronavirus pandemic, Harris touted
the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it will do for children and families in poverty what years of earlier efforts could not.
When asked whether the administration would take executive action to address gun reform, Harris pointed to President Joe Biden’s “longstanding track record on this issue,” including his involvement in the 1994 federal ban on assault-style weapons, which expired in 2004.
“It’s not about getting rid of the Second Amendment. It’s saying ‘Hey, look, assault weapons, you know how assault weapons have been designed? They’ve been designed to kill a lot of people quickly. It’s a weapon of war. It has no place on the streets of civil society,’ ” she said after her remarks at the West Haven Child Development Center.
Biden, in a news conference this week following the shooting that killed 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., urged the Senate to pass legislation to close loopholes on background checks for guns.
“Why would you want those?” Harris said Friday. “Well, because you just might want to know, before someone can buy a lethal weapon, if they’ve been found by a court to be a danger to themselves or others. You just might want to know, before someone can buy a lethal weapon, if they’ve been convicted of a violent felony.”
Harris said she worked with Biden following the shootings at Sandy Hook when he was vice president and she was California’s attorney general.
“We are equally committed to addressing the issue,” she said.
Connecticut has “extraordinary leaders on this” in U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, she said. “We all feel the same way. There should never be another Sandy Hook.”
At a news conference outside Roberto Clemente School in New Haven earlier Friday ahead of the vice president’s arrival, Blumenthal said he planned to talk privately with Harris about gun control measures. A member of his staff confirmed later in the day that he did have a discussion with her on the issue.
While the vice president’s visit was about how the rescue plan, and specifically the child tax credit, which economists say could lift as many as 4 million children nationwide out of poverty, Blumenthal said he planned to talk to Harris about gun violence, a leading cause of death among children.
The senator said he would be conveying a message from Kristin Song, of Guilford, whose son, Ethan Song, who was shot and killed on Jan. 31, 2018, while handling a .357 Magnum pistol at a neighbor’s house. His death inspired “Ethan’s Law,” which would require all firearms, loaded and unloaded, to be safely stored in homes occupied by minors under 18 years of age.
Song’s message to the vice president: “Continue the fight for common sense measures to stop gun violence,” Blumenthal said.
Both Blumenthal and Murphy said they’ve had conversations with the White House about addressing gun control through executive action, which they said officials may consider.
“They seem very open to the idea,” Blumenthal said. “I would not be surprised by some executive action on gun violence.”
Pressed on when that might happen, Blumenthal said “in the coming weeks.”
In conversations with the administration on executive action, Murphy said he’s underscored “low-hanging fruit the administration could grab,” such as regulating of so-called ghost guns, homemade guns that don’t have a serial number, and “clarifying when as a private seller you’re selling so many guns that you should be licensed federally,”an issue President Barack Obama worked on.
Biden recently named Harris the administration’s point person to deal with the immigration issues on the southern border. In that issue, she said the United States must address the “root causes” of the migration from Central American countries.
“We can’t just be in a reactive mode,” she said.