Pulse survivor: Sen. Warren’s plan is best for gun reform

For most of my life, politics felt far away. Despite studying the subject in college, I told myself I was too busy to get involved. That all changed on June 12, 2016, the night that I escaped death at Pulse nightclub. A man filled to the brim with hatred poured over 100 rounds from an assault rifle into the club. As the smell of blood and smoke permeated the bathroom where I crouched, I bolted for an open door. I didn’t look left. I didn’t look right. I clenched my jaw and willed my feet to keep moving. I survived that night — too many others did not.

Suddenly, politics didn’t feel so distant anymore. The weight of Congress’ inaction and a political system crippled by corruption was crushing my community. Gun violence was not a distant news story, it had landed in my backyard. The victims were no longer strangers but friends whose voices had been stolen too soon.

Surviving the massacre at Pulse opened my eyes. If I was going to stop other communities from suffering the same fate as mine, I needed to get off the sidelines and join the fight — to speak out against gun lobby corruption and stand tall against the NRA.

Americans overwhelmingly support background checks and red flag laws, and a majority support mandatory gun licenses, and banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines. In 2018, Democrats won back control of the House of Representatives with gun violence prevention at the center of their platform.

If common sense reforms are supported by so many Americans, why haven’t the people who represent us signed them into law? The answer is simple: toxic, deeprooted corruption.

The gun lobby spends millions of dollars each year to buy the votes of politicians across the country. And in the past year, Floridians have learned that NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer has spent the past two decades gobbling up gun lobby money and pushing through gun friendly legislation. Those gun lobby dollars have been used to defy the will of the voters, upend our democracy, and prevent our state and the country at large from taking meaningful steps to end the epidemic of gun violence.

Most Democrats have been calling for common-sense gun violence prevention measures. But there is one person who has been clearest in articulating the connection between our broken, corrupt system and our inability to pass common-sense gun legislation, and that’s Elizabeth Warren.

We’ve come to know Elizabeth as the candidate with the plans. But all of those plans come back to one simple idea: making our government work for everyone, not just the wealthy and well-connected. The stalemate on our gun violence epidemic is one of the most obvious symptoms of how corruption is rotting our government.

Elizabeth’s plan to protect communities from gun violence is an ambitious agenda to reduce gun homicides by 80 percent. She advocates for a mix of executive actions and eliminating the filibuster as a means to enact the common-sense measures that the majority of voters support. She says she will expand mandatory background checks, raise the minimum purchasing age, close the “boyfriend loophole” that allows exes with prior convictions to have access to guns, and direct federal agencies to target bad actors who sell weapons illegally and move guns across our borders.

Most importantly, I’m supporting Elizabeth because her plan addresses the corruption at the root of our gun violence crisis head on. In fact, Elizabeth says her top priority as President will be to enact the most sweeping set of anti-corruption reforms since Watergate. Elizabeth believes that the Trump Administration is the most corrupt in American history, but Donald Trump is just the latest symptom of a very broken system — the same broken system that fueled Trump’s rise allowed the NRA to buy influence with impunity.

Donald Trump must be defeated in 2020, but so must the culture of corruption and greed in Tallahassee and Washington that helped his rise. If we are going to end the scourge of gun violence, we need a leader who has the courage and vision to make big, structural change.