House begins hearing on ‘urgent need to address gun violence epidemic’
The House oversight committee has opened its hearing dubbed “the urgent need to address the gun violence epidemic,” which is likely to be a gut-wrenching look into the recent spate of mass shootings nationwide.
Among those testifying is Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grade student who survived the shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the parents of Lexi Rubio, who was killed in the massacre, local pediatrician Roy Guerrero and Zeneta Everhart, whose son was shot in the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Republican lawmakers, who make up a minority in the chamber, have invited Lucretia Hughes of Women for Gun Rights’s DC Project.
You can watch along here.
US continues to recognize Juan Guaido as interim president of Venezuela – White House
Joanna Walters
The US regards Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the true interim president of his country, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said moments ago aboard Air Force One, more than three years after Guaidó declared himself the true victor in a disputed election over Nicolás Maduro and tried to topple the man in control of the troubled South American nation.
US president Joe Biden plans to speak with Guaido at some point during this week’s Summit of the Americas meeting that the US is hosting in California for leaders from the hemisphere, Sullivan said.
Biden, aides, staff and media are on board Air Force One now, en route Washington, DC, to Los Angeles, and Sullivan and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre are gaggling – with Sullivan on right now, answering accompanying journalists’ questions.
Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba were not invited to the summit, prompting a boycott by Mexico, in a debacle for Biden.
Brazilian autocratic president Jair Bolsonaro will attend and Biden is expected to discuss “open, transparent and democratic elections” with him, Sullivan said.
And the climate and the health of the Amazon rainforest will be on the agenda, Sullivan said.
There is much hope in journalism circles that Bolsonaro can be pressed at the summit to address the topics of illegal logging and drug trafficking in vast, supposedly-protected tracts of the Amazon region and the danger to those who strive against such destructive law-making – including freelance journalist and Guardian regular Dom Phillips and his traveling companion, indigenous culture expert Bruno Araújo Pereira, missing in the region since Sunday.
Interim summary
It’s been an extremely busy day in Washington and there is more to come. The House oversight committee hearing on the “urgent need to address gun violence” in the US, following very recent mass shootings, is now on lunch recess.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is now “gaggling” on Air Force One, as Joe Biden heads to Los Angeles to host the Summit of the Americas. It’s a bumpy ride for those aboard the presidential plane (literally but, presumably, always metaphorically).
Here’s where things stand:
- Senate minority leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell is calling on Capitol Hill for more security for supreme court justices, following the reports this morning that an armed man was arrested near supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home on the outskirts of Washington DC. The court said the man told police he wanted to kill the judge.
- The supreme court ruled in favor of a border agent in a case from the US-Canadian border involving an inn that allegedly is a stopover when some people cross into Canada unlawfully.
- The House oversight committee opened its hearing dubbed “the urgent need to address the gun violence epidemic”, which became a gut-wrenching look into the recent spate of mass shootings nationwide.
Back at the House oversight committee, Democratic and Republican lawmakers are taking turns questioning the witnesses, creating a split-screen view of the two parties’ attitudes on gun control.
Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins recalls a childhood in which “we had guns everywhere” and wonders why there weren’t mass shootings back then.
“I asked you all what happened to that country,” Higgins said. “A country where guns were everywhere and virtually not regulated at all, where millions of Americans, 14 million Americans came back … after world war II with incredible skills of war and weapons of war as you call them everywhere, but we didn’t have mass shootings.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, drew a line between increasing firearm sales and gunmakers’ profits, declaring, “This is about blood money.”
“There’s also this discussion about anything but, again, but that these are about violent people, but yet we aren’t doing anything about addressing the actual root causes of misogyny, where two-thirds of mass shootings are connected to domestic violence, or the emergence of white supremacy, radicalization, mass incarceration and poverty and the connections between that and mass shootings in our communities,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ahead of the start of the January 6 hearings tomorrow, the committee’s chair, Bennie Thompson, told NPR in an interview that democracy came close to ending in the United States that day.
Thompson says he’s calling it as he sees it on the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack that was intended to keep Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results. And he says he’s gained a new education about the danger the country faced that day, which he aims to share through the hearings.
For Thompson, preserving democracy today means telling the full story of the attack on the Capitol and ensuring its moment in history is one that Americans never forget. “
I have learned a lot about how perilously close we came on January 6 to losing this democracy as a lot of us have come to know and love it.”
My colleague Hugo Lowell’s story published earlier today outlined how the first hearing will go, which will take place during the prime-time TV hour at 8 pm eastern.
At the start of the hearing, the panel’s chairman Bennie Thompson and vice-chair Liz Cheney will make a series of opening arguments before outlining a general roadmap of how each of the six Watergate-style hearings are expected to unfold.
For the second hour, Thompson and Cheney will hand control of the hearing to Tim Heaphy, the chief investigative counsel for the select committee, who will lead the questioning of two witnesses and walk through the key moments of the Capitol attack.
The select committee is expected to start the questioning with testimony from Nick Quested, a British documentary film-maker who was embedded with the far-right Proud Boys group in the days and weeks leading up to January 6 and caught their activities on camera.
The justice department has named a nine-person panel to review the police response to the Uvalde shooting, the Associated Press reports.
In a statement, the Justice Department said it was committed to “moving as expeditiously as possible in the development of the report.” Officials said the team would conduct a complete reconstruction of the shooting; review all relevant documents, including policies, photos and videos; conduct a visit to the school; and interview an array of witnesses and families of the victims, along with police, school and government officials.
A FBI unit chief will take part in the inquiry, as will the former police chief of Sacramento, the sheriff of Orange county, Florida, and a deputy chief whose tenure included Virginia Tech. Similar investigations followed the 2015 extremist attack in San Bernardino, California and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando.
The police response to the Uvalde shooting has been criticized after officers waited before confronting the gunman. State officials have acknowledged that hesitating was “the wrong decision,” and scrutiny has focused on Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the police chief who was recently sworn onto the city council.
McConnell decries ‘assassination attempt or something close to it’ on Kavanaugh
Joanna Walters
Senate minority leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell is calling on Capitol Hill for more security for supreme court justices, following the reports this morning that an armed man was arrested near supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home on the outskirts of Washington DC.
This morning’s disturbing reports are exactly why the Senate unanimously passed a Supreme Court security bill weeks ago. But House Democrats have inexplicably blocked it. House Democrats need to stop their blockade and pass this uncontroversial bill today. pic.twitter.com/wd8UB5RDvm
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) June 8, 2022
McConnell said on the floor of the Senate: “This is where we are, Mr President, if these reports are correct, an assassination attempt against a sitting justice, or something close to it. This is exactly the kind of event that many feared the terrible breach of the court’s rules and norms would fuel [with the leak last month of the draft opinion that the conservative majority wants to overturn constitutional abortion rights afforded by the 1973 Roe V Wade ruling].
“This is exactly that kind of event that many worried the unhinged, reckless, apocalyptic rhetoric from prominent figures towards the court going back many months and especially in recent weeks could make more likely.”
He said that was why the Senate passed legislation shortly after the early May leak, to enhance police protection for sitting justices and their families.
“This is common sense, non-controversial legislation that passed unanimously in this chamber, but House Democrats have spent weeks blocking. That needs to change right now.”
Lawmakers on the House oversight committee are now questioning the witnesses, in a conversation that is overall a little more strident than the Senate’s similar hearing yesterday.
Before questioning began, lawmakers heard from Amy Swearer of The Heritage Foundation, who was invited by the Republican minority and provided the conservative rebuttal to the officials and advocates who spoke before her.
“An unspeakably horrific event, like Uvalde or Buffalo happens. Reflexively, almost compulsively, come calls for Congress to pass a whole host of gun control measures largely targeting peaceable, law abiding citizens,” Swearer said. “Should anyone dare question the constitutionality, practicality or even the effectiveness of any of these policies, their opposition is immediately framed as callous obstructionism. And their legitimate concerns are brushed aside as and I quote, bullshit.”
She downplayed the effectiveness of legislation against expanded capacity magazines, and called for more armed guards at school, improvements to building security, mental health care and to “promote responsible gun ownership without simultaneously imposing financial burdens on gun owners or hindering their ability to immediately respond to violent threats.”
Buffalo’s police commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, took aim at the concept promoted by gun rights advocates that expanding firearms access could stop mass shootings.
“It is often said that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun,” Gramaglia told the House. However, retired Buffalo police officer Aaron Salter Jr., who was working as a security guard at the Tops Market and was killed in the shooting, “Was no match for what he went up against a legal AR-15 with multiple high capacity magazines.”
Noting that such mass shootings make up a minority of overall gun crime, the commissioner warned of new gun technologies that could make the problem worse.
“The grim reality is that shootings have become a daily occurrence in American cities. Emerging trends like ghost guns and guns modified with switches continue to pose a challenge for law enforcement,” Gramaglia said.
“Congress must update our laws to account for these new threats and carnage that has accompanied them. It will be nearly impossible to address the gun violence epidemic without first addressing the underlying violent crime problem.”
Warning that it is “high noon in America,” New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, told lawmakers in the House: “The clock is ticking, every day, every minute towards another hour of death.”
The New York City Police Department is overwhelmed by illegal guns, he said, despite confiscating 3,000 this year alone. Adams called for more federal aid for states and cities, the confirmation of Biden’s nominee to lead the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and for Congress to expand background check and pass other gun control legislation.
“I stand with President Joe Biden in calling on Congress to act now to regulate or ban assault weapons in this country. Even if we only raise the age required to buy one of these weapons, lives will be saved,” the mayor said. “We must build a society where our youth are on a path to fulfillment, not a road to ruin.”
Armed man arrested near supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home
Joanna Walters
The US Supreme Court says an armed man has been arrested near associate justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home after making threats against him, the Associated Press writes.
The Washington Post was first with the story, reporting that a California man in his mid-twenties, with at least one weapon in his possession and tools used in burglaries, was apprehended near the judge’s home in Maryland and had told law enforcement that he wanted to kill Kavanaugh, and citing people familiar with the investigation. It happened at about 1.50am ET today.
The Post further reports that:
Two people familiar with the investigation said the initial evidence indicates the man was angry about the leaked draft of an opinion by the Supreme Court signaling the court is preparing to overturn Roe. v. Wade, the 49-year-old decision that guaranteed a person’s constitutional right to have an abortion. He was also angry over a recent spate of mass shootings, those people said.
Following the leak last month of that draft opinion – with the final opinion awaited with enormous tension across the US this month – protesters appeared near the homes of conservative members of the supreme court bench.
These included Samuel Alito, who wrote the draft opinion that was leaked and slammed the Roe decision, and two of the justices nominated by Donald Trump that represented a strong swing to the right on the nine-member bench – Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Those previous protests were entirely peaceful, though technically probably illegal, and there had apparently been no arrests.
Here’s what Lauren Burke reported for the Guardian at the time:
After a brief recess, the House hearing has now moved on to testimony from elected officials, representatives from advocacy groups and other, but it wrapped up its first half with more gut-wrenching testimony from parents affected by gun violence.
Kimberly Rubio described how she found out that her daughter Lexi was among those killed in Uvalde, and outlined specific policies she thinks could prevent such attacks. “We understand that for some reason, to some people, to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns, the guns are more important than children,” Rubio said.
“So at this moment, we ask for progress. We seek to raise the age to purchase these weapons from 18 to 21 years of age, we seek red flag laws, stronger background checks. We also want to repeal gun manufacturers liability, immunity.”
Lucretia Hughes of Women for Gun Rights’s DC Project told lawmakers how her 19-year-old son was shot and killed while playing dominoes, but unlike the witnesses before her, she did not call for more restrictions on firearms. Rather, she saw weapons as an important tool for self-defense and linked gun control laws to racism.
“Something has to change. Thoughts and prayers and calls for more gun control isn’t enough. How about letting me defend myself from evil? You don’t think that I’m capable and trustworthy to handle a firearm? You don’t think that the second amendment doesn’t apply to people that look like me?” said Hughes, who is Black.
“Who and you who would call for more gun controls are the same ones that are calling to defund the police? Who is supposed to protect us? We must prepare to be our own first responders to protect ourselves and our loved ones.”
