Opinion: Why this election matters for gun safety

Like many Americans, I have grown increasingly concerned about the outcome of the Presidential election – and what it means for the safety of our communities. With gun violence as the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States, gun safety has catapulted to the number one issue for me when I choose who I am going to vote for up and down the ballot — and it’s why I am supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

When I heard that President Joe Biden was stepping out of the race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, I was confident that she would prioritize continuing the legacy of the Biden-Harris Administration as the strongest gun safety administration in our country’s history. Under President Biden, the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was created and historic executive action was taken to expand background checks to address deadly loopholes in our background check system and to combat unserialized, untraceable ghost guns.

The culmination of President Biden’s career-spanning commitment to ending gun violence, however, was the passage of the first gun safety law in 30 years. Thanks to the leadership of President Biden, Vice President Harris, and a bipartisan gun sense majority in Congress, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was passed into law in June 2022. Since then, violent crime is down, gun trafficking prosecutions are up, and hundreds of millions have been invested in community violence intervention programs, implementing Red Flag laws, and improving school safety.

But the truth is that progress has been made to reduce gun violence in our country not only because of the leadership of our elected officials, but also because of the work of individual people from all different backgrounds across America, who, like me, are demanding action within our communities, statehouses, and federal government. Since Moms Demand Action was founded over ten years ago, we have been at the frontlines of the gun safety movement, demonstrating that gun violence prevention is not only good policy, it’s good politics. In elections since, we have seen that candidates running on gun safety win, because it’s what their constituents want. The result has been thousands of strong state- and local-level gun safety laws.

But to protect the progress we’ve made and continue pushing forward, we have to keep electing leaders who will address this crisis with the urgency it deserves. We have to do the work now to enact new gun violence prevention laws and uphold our existing ones, so that future generations can enjoy the safety they provide.

Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated a fierce commitment to ending America’s gun violence epidemic throughout her career. As the Attorney General of California, she worked to strengthen gun safety laws and support victims of crime, including survivors of gun violence. In the Senate, she co-sponsored bills to expand background checks and prevent abusive partners from owning firearms. Now, as Vice President, she leads the country’s first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and has been a champion for the administration’s gun safety initiatives. As president, she will build on that record of life-saving results and fight for a future free from gun violence. 

We have to do the work now for a future where our children can grow up without the fear of gun violence. We have to do the work now to protect our communities. We have to do the work now to make common-sense gun laws a reality.

The stakes have never been higher, but the choice is quite simple. Vice President Harris is fighting to protect us from gun violence while the Trump-Vance ticket has failed records on gun safety. We can’t afford to watch this election from the sidelines.

I will be out in my community this fall, knocking on doors and sending postcards to encourage people to show up and vote to protect the progress that has been made on gun safety over these past four years. I won’t be a bystander in my daughter’s future. My future, her future, your future, is worth showing up for.