Kamala Harris to appear in Parkland later this month to discuss gun violence

Vice President Kamala Harris is coming to Broward County to discuss the gun violence epidemic in the U.S.

The White House announced Monday that Harris will visit Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Saturday, March 23, to meet with family members who lost loved ones in the 2018 mass shooting at the Parkland school, where 17 people were killed. The campus is slated to be demolished later this year.

Harris oversees the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, created by President Joe Biden last September. In his State of the Union address last week, Biden boasted that “we beat the NRA” when Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022. That measure strengthened background checks for purchasers under the age of 21 and individuals convicted of domestic abuse, helped states put red flag laws in place (removing guns from people deemed dangerous), and added thousands of mental health counselors.

Biden also called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in his speech. Those proposals aren’t moving anywhere in a divided Congress, however.

In Florida, in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shootings the Legislature approved the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act to impose new restrictions. But in the just-concluded legislative session in Tallahassee, the GOP-controlled state House of Representatives moved to repeal two key provisions of that groundbreaking law, voting to shorten the mandatory waiting period to purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer and to reduce the age to buy a long gun from 21 to 18.

But those bills won’t become law, because they lacked any support in the Senate. The bill to shorten the mandatory waiting period to purchase a gun never was heard in any committee in that chamber, while there was never even a companion bill filed in the Senate to lower the age to purchase a long gun.

This will be Harris’ 11th trip to the Sunshine State since being sworn into office in January 2021, according to the White House. She came to Florida several times last year, including in September to speak with college students at Florida International University in Miami, and to Orlando last summer, where she blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration over the state’s African-American history standards for K-12 students.