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mass shootings
Trump 'Going to Get Americans Killed' With Industry-Friendly Gun Order, Warn Critics
"Remember the next time that a mass shooting happens," said one gun control advocate, "Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it."
Feb 08, 2025
An executive order issued Friday by President Donald Trump that aims to rollback gun control measures instituted by his predecessor received a swift rebuke from critics who said the order should be seen as a giveaway to the profit-hungry gun industry at the expense of a society ruthlessly harmed by gun violence year after year after year.
Trump's order tasks U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi with conducting a sweeping review of the policies and positions of the previous administration and Justice Department as it relates to gun policies, including any executive orders issued by President Joe Biden during his term and the DOJ's positions taken on "all ongoing and potential litigation" related to firearms.
"On the chopping block," reportsThe Trace, "are several high-profile attempts by [Biden] to reduce gun violence, including regulations on ghost guns, expanded background checks on gun sales, and tougher regulatory oversight of lawbreaking gun dealers."
"Trump's priorities couldn't be more clear. Spoiler: it's not protecting kids."
According to the outlet, which focuses on the nation's gun violence crisis:
While most of Biden’s policies have taken effect, lawsuits against them are ongoing. In his executive order, Trump directed the attorney general to also review the Justice Department’s decision to defend those regulations, as well as all other gun-related litigation in which the government is involved. From age limits on firearm sales to the ban on gun possession by people convicted of felonies, federal gun laws have been under constant threat in the courts since a 2022 Supreme Court decision dramatically expanded gun rights.
If the Justice Department declines to defend the current federal laws in court, it would significantly raise the chances of them being ruled unconstitutional.
Gun control advocates widely rebuked the executive order, warning that Trump's reversal of the minimal amount of progress Biden was able to make was an endorsement of more death, pain, and suffering for the American people, including children, who too often find themselves at the deadly end of a gun's barrel.
"Trump's priorities couldn't be more clear. Spoiler: it's not protecting kids," said Natalie Fall, March For Our Lives executive director. "Gun deaths finally went down last year, and Trump just moved to undo the rules and laws that helped make that happen."
Trump's right-wing MAGA movement, she continued, "loves to rage about 'keeping kids safe,' but it’s all a smokescreen. They don’t care about what is actually killing and maiming thousands of American kids every year: gun violence. He is going to get Americans killed in his thirst for vengeance and eagerness to please the gun lobby and rally armed extremists. Remember, the next time that a mass shooting happens, Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it."
Hudson Munoz, executive director of the advocacy group Guns Down America, shared similar sentiments and said the president's latest order "is as reckless as it is predictable."
Not for the first time, he argued, Trump is "proving that he cares more about appeasing the gun industry than protecting the American people. This order is downright dangerous. His incompetence and Attorney General Pam Bondi's blind loyalty to the Trump agenda will lead to more violence while a few shareholders and gun industry executives line their pockets."
Referencing public polls, Munoz said more than 70% of people in the U.S. approve of common-sense gun safety laws that Trump and the gun lobby are attempting to destroy.
"Make no mistake, this executive order is about business," he said. "Trump is working to unleash more guns into American public life to boost the profits of gun manufacturers. This order leaves Americans to foot the bill with more gun deaths, more taxpayer dollars spent on emergency responses, and more families shattered by violence—while a handful of businesses cash in."
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Multiple People Killed in Wisconsin School Shooting
"This reality is inexcusable," said one prominent gun control group. "We owe it to our children to #EndGunViolence."
Dec 16, 2024
This is a breaking news story... Please check back for possible updates.
Multiple people including the alleged shooter were killed and numerous others were wounded following a mass shooting Monday at a Christian school in Wisconsin's capital city.
After initially reporting a higher death toll, Madison police said three people were killed and seven others were hospitalized following the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in the city's East Buckeye neighborhood. The alleged perpetrator was reportedly a 15-year-old female student at the school who shot and killed a teacher and a student.
"When officers arrived, they found multiple victims suffering from gunshot wounds," Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes—who called it a "sad, sad day"—told reporters at a press conference.
Our hearts ache deeply as we confront the devastating tragedy at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. Once more, we are shattered by the horror of a school shooting that has claimed innocent lives and left many injured—a grim reminder of the ongoing crisis plaguing our communities.
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— Joe Sakran, MD, MPH, MPA (@josephsakran.bsky.social) December 16, 2024 at 10:33 AM
"Yet another police chief is doing a press conference to speak about violence in our community, specifically in one of the places that's most sacred to me as someone who loves education and to someone who has children that are in schools," the chief said.
"Stop asking why schools don't have bulletproof glass and metal detectors at all the doors," Barnes added. "Ask why schools have to. That's the question that needs to be asked."
Gun control advocates condemned the shooting and lack of action toward tackling a decadeslong public health crisis that's claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
"This reality is inexcusable," said Brady United Against Gun Violence. "We owe it to our children to #EndGunViolence."
March for Our Lives, a youth-led gun control movement, said, "One thing is clear: This act of violence should have never been possible."
"But it is, because our 'leaders' are more interested in pandering to the gun lobby to score political points than they are in keeping us safe," the group continued. "It is sickening to know that school is not a safe place to be a child in America thanks to politicians' inaction."
"Today, our hearts break once again, but our resolve strengthens," March for Our Lives added. "We refuse to inherit a country where mass shootings are acceptable. We will fight on for a safer future."
The progressive group A Better Wisconsin Together said in a statement that "every kid deserves to go to school without fearing for their lives, teachers deserve to feel safe at work, and parents deserve to drop their kids off at school and not wonder whether their child will be a victim of gun violence."
"A Better Wisconsin Together continues to fight for a future where all Wisconsinites are free to learn in school, go to work, and move through our local communities without the fear of gun violence," the group added. "Enough is enough."
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Even a Good President With a Gun Won’t Save Us
VP Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them. But that won’t prevent mass shootings.
Sep 25, 2024
It’s happened far more times than I care to remember. Waking up super early on Sunday morning to write my weekend column, I flip on the TV and there’s some dark and fuzzy video of multiple police cars, flashing blue and red outside some urban nightclub or restaurant, as the anchors solemnly report that while we were sleeping, there was yet another mass shooting in America.
But this Sunday morning, the news cut a little differently.
The rapid machine-gun-like fire had lit up a crowded street in Birmingham, Alabama, the city where I lived and worked as a young journalist in the early 1980s. CNN zoomed in with a map, and my heart sank because I instantly knew the exact area where four people were murdered and another 17 were injured, some seriously.
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1:00 pm NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?
The shooter, or possibly more than one shooter, fired more than 100 rounds at a packed sidewalk in the Birmingham entertainment district known as Five Points South, a few blocks from the University of Alabama-Birmingham campus. My fading 20-something memories of the place are fond ones—meeting journalist pals for a beer on the Deep South’s brutally humid summer nights, nodding along with the ever-present Alabama or Auburn fans, even drinking my first-ever Long Island iced tea (and, thankfully, one of my last) from a Mason jar.
Some 40 years later, it took just a few seconds for a shooter with a legal semi-automatic and, police believe, a “switch” that turned it into a machine gun, to shatter any happy recollections of the place, and the lives of the people there just out for a fun Saturday night.
“All of a sudden it was just gunshots, gunshots, gunshots,” 24-year-old Gabriel Eslami, who was on the line for the Hush hookah bar, told CNN. “I started running for my life”—but he was struck by a bullet in the leg and fell to the ground. When he looked up, the scene felt like a “horror movie... There are bodies laid out all over the sidewalk, gun smoke in the air. There are shoes. People ran out of their shoes trying to escape. I saw people hiding behind cars, laying under cars.”
It may have sounded like the climax of a gory Hollywood movie, but in 2024 news cycle, the Birmingham mass shooting was something of a blip. NPR did lead its Monday afternoon newscast with the story, but The New York Times buried its print article on pageA14. In an age of school shootings and presidential assassination attempts, bursts of gunfire on crowded city streets are getting shorter and shorter shrift. This was, after all, the third quadruple murder in Birmingham this year, including one outside a public library. Didn’t hear about that? Me neither.
And yet like any mass shooting in the only developed nation that routinely has them, the Birmingham incident raised some serious questions about policy. Why has the gun-loving red state of Alabama not banned these switches, given their potential for mass carnage? Why has Birmingham seen its murder rate increase in 2024, even as crime is mostly falling nationally? Are we truly helpless to get high-powered assault weapons—subject to an imperfect but highly effective federal ban from 1994-2004—off the streets of America’s cities?
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1:00 pm NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?
Where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham?
One place where the bullets didn’t seem to have much impact was in the presidential race, where guns have been an issue, but not always in the ways one might expect. To be sure, the Democrats are the party that believes government can do something to reduce gun violence. I was there in Chicago’s United Center in August when the loved ones of gunfire victims gave poignant pleas to Democrats, and the party has vowed to again to ban assault rifles and enact common-sense gun laws—in the highly unlikely event it can get around a GOP Senate filibuster. Republican nominee Donald Trump brags that when he was president,“nothing happened” to stop mass killings.
The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, didn’t release a statement about the Birmingham shooting. Maybe there’s just too many mass shootings in America, or maybe it would be different if Alabama were a swing state. But also, Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them.
Harris again confirmed last week to Oprah Winfrey that she owns a gun for her personal protection from her prosecutor days, telling the TV icon that “if somebody’s breaking into my house, they’re getting shot.” First, if someone’s breaking into the vice president’s home, then the Secret Service is in worse shape than we thought. Second, multiple studies have shown that people with guns in their home are more likely to get shot than those who do not, so I’m not sure why Harris encourages that choice. Her campaign then released an online spot that kicked off with highlighting her gun ownership before saying all the right things, including support for an assault-weapons ban.
It’s Politics 101, right? Harris didn’t have to run in any primaries and woo left-wing Democrats as she did for a time in 2019, but now she hopes her affirmation of gun ownership will win over middle-of-the-road undecideds in the general election. Except where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham? Because that outrage is necessary to convince the public that we need some radical changes if people are going to feel safe again going out on a Saturday night, or putting our kids on a school bus.
A good president with a gun wouldn’t have stopped a mass killing in Birmingham. A good president with a moral crusade and a plan just might stop the next one.
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