We need urgent reform after school shootings. Not same cowardly words. – The Washington Post

Hours after two students and two teachers had been killed in a school shooting, allegedly committed by a 14-year-old boy with an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon, Kemp declared: “Today is not the day for politics or policy.” Really? Actually, his record makes it clear what date he has in mind for that discussion: Never. From what we know so far, the horrific slayings at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., have everything to do with the politics and policy of gun safety. Thoughts and prayers did not prevent the needless deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Thoughts and prayers did not keep a student, allegedly Colt Gray, from using a weapon of war to commit this atrocity. Advertisement But popular, common-sense gun laws might have prevented this tragedy. And this is precisely the moment when we should be debating and implementing those policies — before some other American community joins the mournful list that includes Newtown, Conn.; Parkland, Fla.; Uvalde, Tex. The FBI said sheriff’s deputies interviewed Gray and his father last year, when the boy was only 13, to follow up on anonymous online tips about threats of a school shooting. The father said that there were hunting guns in the house, according to the FBI, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. Such laws, thus far adopted by 26 states, have been found to have widespread public support, according to the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. One was proposed by a Democrat last year in the Georgia state legislature, but Kemp and his party refused to move it forward. Advertisement Twenty-one states and D.C. have “red flag” laws that allow authorities to seek court orders to temporarily confiscate weapons from people at serious risk of harming themselves or others. Wherever the rifle came from, a majority of Americans — 61 percent, according to a Fox News poll — support a ban on assault weapons. But the ban was allowed to expire, and Republicans in Congress have blocked any attempt to renew it. But he is not, in fact, an adult; he is 14 years old. Late Thursday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that the boy’s father, Colin Gray, has also been arrested on charges that include involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder. A spokesman said the arrest was “directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing [Colt Gray] to possess a weapon.” If the father was indeed the son’s enabler, holding him accountable is a positive step – if Georgia has the statutory framework to make the charges stick. Advertisement All of these are questions of “politics or policy.” Kemp campaigned for governor on a promise to expand access to firearms, and he has delivered, signing into law a bill allowing Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or any background check. In one campaign ad that was supposed to be funny, Kemp sat with a shotgun in his lap pointed in the direction of a teenage boy who supposedly wanted to date one of Kemp’s daughters. Of our two major political parties, only one — the GOP — panders to the National Rifle Association and the most extreme Second Amendment absolutists by refusing even to consider modest gun safety measures that have majority support, even among gun owners. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/05/kemp-georgia-school-shooting/