Vice President Harris speaks to the media about gun safety measures as family members hold portraits of loved ones killed during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on March 23, 2024, in Parkland, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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Mattie Scott first met Kamala Harris in 2002. Harris was running for district attorney of San Francisco; Scott was organizing mothers there who had lost children to gun violence. Scott’s youngest son, George, was killed six years earlier, when he tried to break up a fight at a party. He took six bullets from a semi-automatic rifle and died instantly. He was 24 years old, the father of two young boys.
He was the fifty-third homicide victim from gun violence in San Francisco that year, one of an eventual 82 Black men who died that way in 1996, Scott said. In the wake of that nightmare of a year, Scott began gathering other mothers who had lost children to gun violence for weekly healing circles and to talk with local leaders.
When the group met with Harris, she vowed that if elected, something would be done — and urgently.
Harris and Scott have been talking about gun violence prevention ever since.
“She cares about the people on the ground,” Scott said. “She’s an on-the-ground person. She’s a community person. She will come in and protect you and look out for the person who’s being harmed. That’s her.”
Harris always calls Scott when she’s back in San Francisco. The two talk about the things they’ve been talking about for over 20 years now: their mothers, their faith, and how inspiration from these two things have kept them going in their work. (Scott is now president of the California chapter of Brady, a longtime gun safety organization.)
Scott’s personal experience and advocacy continues to inform Harris’ approach to combating gun violence. It’s a core issue for the vice president, one featured in her first ad after she took over the Democratic presidential ticket and the focus of multiple speakers at the final night of her nominating convention. In her decades of work on prevention, Harris has looked to the voices of survivors and the evidence-based best practices to try to curb gun violence. Now, as she campaigns for president, she continues to point to her background as a prosecutor, someone who has seen the way laws can shape lives — and save them. Her work on gun safety underscores the way in which she sees public policy as only as strong as the means by which it is implemented, laws only as substantive as their enforcement.
Nine individuals who have seen Harris’ work on gun violence prevention over the past 20 years spoke with The 19th about how Harris has worked on anti-gun-violence measures and engaged with survivors. Harris declined to comment for this story.
In her role as vice president, she helms the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, formed just over a year ago — and she has brought Scott’s voice along with her. Stefanie Feldman, the office’s director and a longtime staffer for President Joe Biden, said that one of the first things she was told by Harris’ team was, “You have to meet with Mattie.” Scott, she was told, was critical in understanding the way in which Harris approached this issue.
Feldman said that over the past year, she has now spoken to Mattie Scott “many times.”
“She’s just an example of how Vice President Harris carries people with her,” Feldman said.
Prevention and prosecution
After their initial meeting in 2002, Harris began joining the healing circles Scott ran. She won the DA race and soon after, opened an office to help young men who had been charged with gun violence crimes find a new path forward, with jobs and social support. She also created a new unit of prosecutors from across various departments to innovate on the prosecution of gun violence — and community-based solutions that could prevent it.
“And I tell you, things began to get better for us,” Scott said. “Not in the sense of violence stopping right away, of course, because the influx of guns was everywhere. But we had a DA who opened her door to us, who felt the pain of us mothers in our community.”
Harris kept going to Scott’s healing circles; if she couldn’t make a session, she sent her assistant district attorney in her place. She also went to vigils, funerals, community meetings, town hall forums, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the predominantly Black, Latinx and Pacific Islander people who were impacted.
Kristine Lucius, who started with Harris as her chief of staff in the Senate in 2019 and is now her domestic policy advisor, said that even as a prosecutor, Harris’ focus was always on prevention in addition to prosecution.
One area of focus was domestic violence. As attorney general, Harris led the push for California to become the third state in the nation to have an extreme risk law — often referred to as a red flag law — in 2014. Such laws allow police, family members, employers and school personnel to temporarily seize firearms from individuals deemed to be dangerous to themselves and others after obtaining a court order. The California law has been credited with preventing 58 mass shootings — six of which involved minors targeting schools — in its first three years. In that time, 30 percent of cases in which the law was invoked involved an intimate partner.
Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris speaks at a news conference on May 17, 2013 at the Los Angeles Civic Center. Harris hosted a meeting of the state’s district attorneys to develop recommendations on reducing gun violence. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Lucius said Harris has key stats on intimate partner violence “on the tip of her tongue” at all times: Access to a gun makes it five times more likely that an abusive partner will kill a woman victim. Seventy-six women are shot and killed each month in the United States.
Years of walking crime scenes as a prosecutor left a lasting impact on Harris, Lucius said. The vice president still thinks about the initial conversation a prosecutor would have with a victim when she thinks about how to go about creating meaningful policy solutions to help them.
“You’re trying to first make sure the person’s OK before you start asking them the details of the toughest moment of their life,” Lucius said.
Dr. Garen Wintemute is the founding director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis and of the California Firearm Violence Research Center, the nation’s first publicly funded center for research in this field. Harris provided critical support in founding the center, he said, and once it was created, California’s Department of Justice — which Harris oversaw — granted its researchers access to data on firearm ownership and firearm trafficking.
“She values science,” he said of Harris. “She values and gives weight to the scientific evidence in making policy decisions — and as AG was a major help in setting things in motion and in paying for that evidence to be collected.”
That approach means that closing the boyfriend loophole, which prevents people convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun; passing red flag laws; and investing in harm reduction programs and mental health support — all policies that look to prevent gun violence — have been successfully implemented, Wintermute said.
Harris’ background — as both a gun owner and in law enforcement — has allowed Harris to “see the complexity” of gun safety policy, Wintemute said. “She knows how hard it is to enforce laws and she knows that without enforcement, laws don’t stand much of a chance of making a difference. She has that frontline, real-world experience that did her well as AG, did well for her as a prosecutor.”
Gun violence and the presidential campaign
Harris is touting her record on gun violence at a time when the national debate on gun safety has shifted. While the loudest voices in Washington used to be those from the National Rifle Association (NRA), stopping policies that would restrict gun ownership, the group’s clout has diminished after scandal, and many restrictions enjoy broad bipartisan support, even if some still don’t make it out of Congress.
The NRA did not reply to The 19th’s request for comment on various proposed gun safety measures and how their membership feels about trends around gun violence prevention work.
Most Americans have felt the toll of the gun violence epidemic — and many want something done about it. In 2023, polling done by KFF found that 54 percent of Americans say that they or a family member have had a first-hand gun-related incident. The gun violence prevention group Everytown reports that 95 percent of American children participate in mandated active shooter drills in schools.
Research conducted this fall by the Pew Research Center found that 56 percent of registered voters say that gun policy is “very important” to them this cycle.
The Harris campaign has embraced that. The “freedom to live free of gun violence” was central to Harris’ very first campaign ad released in July. Former Rep. Gabby Giffords and her husband, Sen. Mark Kelly, both spoke on the final night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), part of a diverse group of survivors of gun violence who addressed its scourge in America.
Emma Brown, the executive director of Giffords, the gun violence prevention research and advocacy group founded by former Giffords and Kelly, said that today, gun safety is unequivocally a “winning issue.”
“We are seeing young Americans, women, Americans of color all talking about this issue as a key driver for how they’re going to vote,” Brown said. “We see swing voters like women in key suburbs across the country talking about this as a key, decisive point in their persuasion.”
Many measures backed by gun violence prevention groups are also broadly popular. A poll conducted by Giffords this summer of likely voters in battleground House districts found that 95 percent support background checks on all gun sales, including 89 percent of gun owners and 91 percent of people who voted in 2020 for former President Donald Trump, Harris’ Republican opponent.
“The right is no longer able to claim that gun owners are universally with them on this issue,” Brown said.
Some of the most notable policy achievements of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s inaugural year have shared roots with Harris’ earliest days of addressing gun violence, with prevention and practical support for communities. The office has expedited the implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act through expanded background checks, including closing the gun show loophole and narrowing the “boyfriend loophole,” supporting the implementation of states’ red flag laws, promoting the safe storage of firearms, putting $400 million into community violence intervention programs, and funding a record $1 billion federal investment in youth mental health.
Wintemute at UC-Davis said that for researchers like him, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention is critical. “I think everybody who’s in the field, whether they have been here a short time or a long time, really appreciated the creation of the office as visible evidence of stepping up the game,” he said.
Survivors
Harris’ focus on survivors is also why she started asking young people if they had ever participated in an active shooter drill and why she frequently echoes what they have told her about gun violence: “It does not have to be this way.” Conversations with young people impacted by gun violence were part of the impetus behind the executive order signed at the end of September by President Joe Biden to distribute guidance and guardrails to schools on how active shooter drills are conducted.
One of the young people impacted by gun violence who turned that into a push for change is Sari Kaufman, who was 15 years old in 2018 when 17 of her classmates, teachers and friends were fatally shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Today, she works as a special assistant in the White House’s Gender Policy Council.
She first met Harris in 2019, when she traveled to Iowa for the 2020 presidential primaries as a student leader with March for Our Lives and Students Demand Action. “She knows how hard you have to work in this movement to get things done. She has told me, ‘Keep going.’”
For Kaufman, one of the most significant things she has seen Harris do is take the time to visit Marjory Stoneman Douglas this past March. “She’s not like everyone else who just references Parkland and moves on and forgets about exactly what happened here and how we’re all still dealing with the pain.”
Sari Kaufman introduces Vice President Kamala Harris at an Executive Order signing on gun violence on September 26, 2024, in the White House’s East Room. (Adam Schultz/The White House)
At Kaufman’s former school, Harris met with the families who had invited her there and toured the school building. On the third floor, blood and broken glass were everywhere. Books and shoes were lying on the floor in the spots where they had been abandoned six years prior. When they reached the spot where the son of one of the mothers present had been killed, stains indicating pools of blood were still visible. The mother began to weep, asking for help in gathering up what was left in the room, the bookbag and papers and detritus. There was too much of her son present there to leave unburied, she said.
Harris took charge, said Rob Wilcox, one of the co-deputy directors of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. She assigned people to assist the mother, to give her what she needed in her active grief.
Wilcox and fellow co-deputy director Gregory Jackson were there that day and had helped prep Harris for the visit. They say that Harris has always stressed to them that the goal of the office is action, to move policies forward that help more people. Both men have been impacted by gun violence themselves. Jackson was shot as a young man, caught in the crossfire of a community shooting in Washington, D.C. Wilcox’s younger cousin was fatally shot while working as a fill-in receptionist at a mental health facility office in California in 2001.
When Harris reviewed her speech she was set to give in Parkland before the trip, Wilcox said, one line stopped her in her tracks: a call to Congress to take action to prevent similar shootings from happening again.
“She looked at us and said, ‘How are we just calling on Congress to act?’” Wilcox recalled. “How are we not doing more as the White House? Where are the ideas?”
Jackson and Wilcox spoke about the role that red flag laws play in cases like Parkland, when a shooter’s friends and family are reporting signs of mental distress and no action is taken. Wilcox told Harris it was no different than how his own cousin had lost her life: In both cases, an extreme risk law might have prevented a shooting.
Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a moment of silence at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School memorial in Parkland, Florida, on March 23, 2024. (Drew Angerer/AFP/Getty Images)
The two noted that post-Parkland, Florida did enact a red flag law. But they also emphasized that while the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act earmarked funding to help states better enforce and implement red flag laws, only a handful of the 21 states with such laws were taking advantage of it.
Harris’ work on this issue in California has become a model nationally for how to communicate with, and earn the buy-in of, law enforcement. That implementation is critical for such laws, Wintemute said, ensuring firearms are recovered by the government when an extreme risk protective order is triggered.
Wilcox and Jackson stressed that states must be given not just funding but protocols and experts they can turn to; it’s why the office was collaborating with the Department of Justice to launch the first-ever National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center. Harris decided then that they would announce the center’s launch that weekend, in Parkland.
Minutes after she helped console the grieving mother, Harris did just that, speaking in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with the impacted families behind her. Within the next six months, the number of states fully implementing their red flag laws with Bipartisan Safer Communities Act resources went from five to 15.
‘This is important work’
When Angela Ferrell-Zabala was named the first-ever executive director of both Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety in May 2023, she was shocked when she got a call from Harris herself.
“She congratulated me and said, ‘This is important work — and we are a team. We’re going to do this together,” Ferrell-Zabala shared. To her, it was a sign of understanding what it was to be Black women working at the forefront of the gun violence prevention movement. “She gave me some amazing, encouraging words of advice about standing in my power and keeping moving forward. And that this isn’t all on my shoulders. That we will do this together.”
Ferrell-Zabala pointed to legislation Harris co-sponsored to close the boyfriend loophole — a measure that eventually made it into the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — and introduced to disarm those convicted of violent hate crimes from purchasing and possessing firearms. “Before she was in any kind of public spotlight, this was on her heart and it continues to be,” Ferrell-Zabala said.
It’s something that Mattie Scott said she has seen up close in the more than 20 years she has known Harris.
Scott was in the room, with Harris, when Biden signed last month’s executive order on reforming active shooter drills and combating emerging firearms threats such as unserialized 3-D printed guns and machine gun conversion devices. Standing in the East Room of the White House, she said, “I felt my son’s spirit. I felt all the mothers around the country that I talk with and deal with every day.”
Scott said she is doing everything in her power to help elect Harris because she knows that mothers of all walks of life across the country are now looking to Harris to help their children, too.
“The people are out here waiting.”
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