Democrat calls AR-15 a ‘golden calf,’ as NC mayors call for action on guns

Rep. Alma Adams called the AR-15 rifle Washington’s “golden calf” from the House floor Tuesday morning as she and 160 mayors called on Congress to do more to end gun violence across the country.

Charlotte’s Vi Lyles and Durham’s Elaine O’Neal were among the mayors who signed an open letter dated Monday.

“We will be judged if we don’t act,” Adams, a Democrat from Charlotte, said in her own remarks Tuesday. “Not only by history, not only by our God, but by our children who will inherit our country with this metastasized gun cancer still attached.”

Adams’ words came on the first full day since Congress returned to Washington following a two-week break, which began just three days after a shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville left three 9-year-olds and three adults dead. The shooter was also killed.

In those two weeks away, five more people were shot on three college campuses across the country, including a person who suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Forsyth Tech Community College in Winston-Salem, according to WSOC-TV.

Adams said that while Congress was away, gun violence stole the lives of another 27 people in Tennessee and 900 across the country.

“It makes me sick,” Adams said. “It makes me livid that we continue to accept the status quo. That we are comfortable living in a country where at any time, our friends, family and neighbors, even our children and our grandchildren, can die a horrible death because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, where the wrong person had a gun.”

Adams also responded to the political fallout from the Nashville shooting in Tennessee, where two state lawmakers were expelled for interrupting House proceedings to lead a public chant calling for gun reform.

“Tennessee Republicans were so afraid of this message that they expelled Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the two Black representatives, for their actions,” Adams said on the House floor Tuesday. “These two courageous men know, as we do, that we cannot wait to be saved from the gun epidemic. They knew there would be more dead.”

She called on her colleagues to stop idolizing the AR-15. Republican lawmakers are often criticized for benefiting from campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association.

“Too many people in the People’s House worship this idol and treat it with reverence; however, just like in the Scripture, if we continue to worship this idol, the result will be physical and spiritual death,” she said.

Adams ended her speech echoing the words of the Tennessee lawmakers: “No more silence. We have to do better. Gun reform now.”

Mayors call for bans and background checks

Local leaders chose not to stay silent, either.

The mayors of Charlotte, Durham and Greensboro signed a letter with 157 other mayors, calling on Congress to act now to end gun violence:

“Today we … urge you to immediately pass and send to the President legislation to ban assault weapons and large capacity magazines and to strengthen the background check system, bills that could have prevented what happened in Louisville and Nashville and so many other cities from happening in the future.”

Last summer, after a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 students and two teachers dead, Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, and Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, worked together to pass the largest gun legislation in three decades.

Murphy, who saw firsthand the aftermath of a mass shooting that killed 28 people, including children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, went viral last year for standing on the Senate floor and chastising his colleagues for letting more elementary school students become victims of a shooting.

“Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate?” Murphy asked then. “Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority if your answer is that as the slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing? What are we doing? Why are you here if not to solve a problem as existential as this?”

Tillis and Murphy spent weeks working together to figure out what were nonstarters among the two political parties on gun legislation and what their colleagues could agree on before proposing the legislation.

Negotiators said more needed to be done. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors agrees. They asked how many more children have to die for lawmakers to act.

“There have been hundreds of mass shootings that occurred over the last year, including those in Louisville, at Michigan State, Half Moon Bay, Monterey Park, Uvalde, Highland Park and Buffalo,” their letter says.

The list doesn’t include a mass shooting in the Hedingham neighborhood of Raleigh that left five people dead and two others injured.

“Too many times mayors have expressed shock at a mass shooting,” the mayors wrote. “Much more frequently, many of us cope with the gun violence that occurs on the streets of our cities.”

The Conference of Mayors said in its letter that the organization has been calling on Congress for more than 50 years to pass sensible gun laws to protect the public.

“The time for Congress to act is now,” the mayors wrote. “Our children deserve better.”