Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) issued an urgent message in The New York Times Tuesday following the second armed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump — get gun violence under control, now.
Her column was published a day after the suspect in the latest assassination attempt was charged with illegally possessing a gun with a felony conviction and possessing a gun with an obliterated serial number.
"There have now been two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in just over two months," said Giffords, who was critically injured in a shooting in 2011.
"The through line is, as it always is, the guns. We are a country weary of repetitive gun violence ... You have a country where shootings on interstate highways appear to be a pattern and students in Kentucky miss several days of school during a manhunt for the perpetrator of the most recent interstate shooting. I imagine many people reading this right now might not even know about that shooting, or that manhunt, or those kids in Kentucky, doing schoolwork at home because it’s not safe to go to school."
Republicans have scrambled to try to blame the latest threat to Trump on Democratic criticism of Trump on the campaign trail, but this is absurd, wrote Giffords — the problem is the access to guns.
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"Rhetoric wasn’t in the bushes around Mr. Trump’s golf course, or on the interstate in Kentucky, or in the school hallways in Georgia, or at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa. Dangerous people with guns were. The most recent would-be attack on the former president, on Sunday, is an indicator of where we are as a nation: a place where no one is safe from gun violence."
And while political anger in the country is "inevitable," continued Giffords, "What’s not inevitable is angry or inexplicably violent people having such easy access to guns."
The time has come, Giffords wrote, to stop trying to talk Americans "out of their own reality" and acknowledge we're all in danger, and must reform our laws.
"Earlier today, students threw books and papers into their backpacks, grabbed lunch or their water bottles and headed out to school," she concluded. "We have promised them safety, but how can we look them, or their parents, in the face and pretend that the answer is anything other than changing easy access to guns?
"Our path forward requires us all — leaders, voters, Americans — to name the problem clearly and to take action."
