Vice President Kamala Harris traveled Saturday to Parkland, Florida, where she toured the site of the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history, announced new White House gun violence prevention measures, and called on more states to pass so-called “red flag” laws.
The visit comes as the Biden administration looks to highlight its progress on gun safety initiatives, including improving interagency communication and state and local response to mass shootings.
Since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, there have been more than 394 school shootings in the U.S., according to data compiled by the Washington Post — exposing more than 360,000 students to gun violence.
Harris did not shy away from those grim statistics during her visit to Parkland. During the trip, she met with families of the Parkland victims and toured the inside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the building where 17 students and faculty members were killed in the span of just six minutes.
The boarded-up building is slated for demolition later this year — but in the meantime, its blood-stained classrooms and bullet-pocked floors have served as a sobering, tragic reminder of the 2018 massacre.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who attended Stoneman Douglas years before the shooting, described the building as a “time capsule” of sorts — a frozen-in-time place where Harris can “learn about the failures of the building, the failures of the response to the shooting by law enforcement, the failures in the training of the teachers, the failures of threat assessments of the shooter and the failure of all the warning signs.”
While in Parkland, Harris will announce the creation of the National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center, or a first-of-its-kind national office designed to support states with so-called “red flag laws” in place. The announcement builds on the White House creation of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention last fall, which Harris was also tapped to lead.
The office, which is funded by a Justice Department grant, will work to assist state and local governments and other service providers, such as behavioral health and social service workers, to “optimize the use” of red flag laws in the states that have adopted them. ERPO will also provide training, technical assistance, and educational opportunities for a “wide variety of stakeholders” in these states, Harris said.
Harris’s visit comes as the Biden administration looks to boost state buy-in for the red flag laws — or laws that effectively allow family members or law enforcement officials to temporarily remove firearms from an individual deemed to be at risk of harming themselves or others.
To date, just 21 states have adopted them, according to a White House fact sheet. Far fewer have utilized the $750 million in federal funds that the Biden administration made available to states by way of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to help them implement state crisis intervention programs.
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Harris also used her remarks Saturday to call on the other 29 states that have not yet taken action on gun violence prevention to pass red flag laws and to utilize BSCA funds.
In Florida, she noted, the red flag law has been used more than 12,000 times since its passage six years ago.
