In a rare venture off her carefully crafted "script," Vice President Kamala Harris commented on this week’s tragic school shooting in Winder, Georgia which left four dead and nine hospitalized.
At her campaign rally in New Hampshire, Harris called the incident "a senseless tragedy," and went on to lament that students have to be "concerned about a shooter busting through the door of the classroom," and "that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive."
In an appropriately exasperated tone, Harris implored the crowd, "We’ve got to stop it."
The "it"? That would be "this epidemic of gun violence in our country," in Harris’s words.
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Harris is right to express concerns about school shootings, but her reference to America’s "epidemic of gun violence" rings hollow, and stands in deep tension with how her allies in the media have responded to concerns raised by Republicans about the very same issue in the context of the broader crime debate. Here are some examples:
The implication is that Trump and other conservatives who express concern about violent crime are fearmongering—cynically lying to voters to gin up angst about the Left’s approach to public safety.
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This all begs a rather obvious question (one the ABC moderators never bothered to ask) that the Harris campaign ought to answer: Which is it? Is crime down so much that we should dismiss Republican-voiced concerns about urban violence and disorder? Or are we in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence that justifies debilitating fears of school classrooms?
The doublespeak contributes to the impression among some that Democrats really only care about gun violence to the extent that the issue can be leveraged to demonize conservatives for their opposition to many "gun control" proposals. I certainly wouldn’t be the first to suggest that suburban school shootings such as last week’s tragedy in Georgia have a much bigger impact on what the Democratic Party says and does than, say, the 31 people shot in Chicago this past Labor Day weekend.
Isn’t it curious that the mass shootings that have taken place on the streets of cities like Memphis, Philadelphia, and Baltimore just in the last few months haven’t gotten any acknowledgement from the vice president? After all, the everyday shootings on city streets—what the criminological literature refers to as "community gun violence"— are far more common than school shootings. If there is an "epidemic" of the latter, there is, by logical necessity, an epidemic of the former.
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The firearm homicide victimization rate of Black men is more than twenty times that of white men in the country, yet concerns about the incidents driving that disparity are dismissed with statistics showing declines in nationally aggregated crime measures. At the same time, "high profile" mass shootings garner national news coverage and "off-script" moments from the vice president. Why?
Perhaps, as I put it in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, it has something to do with the fact that, "data out of cities like Chicago suggest that a key driver of America’s gun violence problem is the systemic failure to meaningfully incapacitate repeat offenders before they kill." The Democrats—Kamala Harris, included—have spent more than a decade running against "over-policing" and "mass incarceration," which led then-candidate Joe Biden to walk back his support for tough on crime measures in the mid-1990s.
But the truth has long been that police are key drivers of public safety, and meaningfully reducing incarceration in the U.S. requires the release or non-incarceration of the violent, high-rate offenders who constitute the vast majority of America’s prisoners.
Acknowledging these realities would, of course, force the Democrats to admit an error, which is why they’ve so tightly clung to recent declines in certain crime measures. The idea that crime is no longer a big deal is one they’re free to sell to voters. But Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways and throw that line right out the window whenever there’s a shooting that fits a preferred narrative.
If Vice President Harris is right about there being an "epidemic" of gun violence in this country, then she ought to reconsider her commitment to sorts of police and criminal justice reforms she has pushed over the years. And she should apologize to those of us who’ve been saying so all along.
