Vice President Kamala Harris attended the funeral service for Ruth Whitfield, the oldest victim of the Buffalo supermarket shooting.
Harris was invited to speak at the funeral, where she used the opportunity to address the country’s current “epidemic of hate.”
“I cannot even begin to express, our collective pain as a nation for what you are feeling in such an extreme way, to not only lose someone that you love, but through an act of extreme violence and hate,” Harris said at the Mt. Olive Baptist Church ceremony. “And I do believe that our nation right now is experiencing an epidemic of hate.”
She continued: “This is a moment that requires all good people, all God-loving people to stand up and say we will not stand for this. Enough is enough. We will come together based on what we all know we have in common, and we will not let those people who are motivated by hate separate us or make us feel fear.”
There have been two mass shootings in the country in as many weeks.
In Buffalo, New York, 10 people were killed in a racist mass shooting at a supermarket. Days later, the country was rocked by a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed by a gunman.
Speaking to reporters, Harris insisted that gun control reform needs to happen now and not sometime in the future.
“On the issue of gun violence, I will say, as I’ve said countless times, we are not sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. You know, we’re not looking for a vaccine,” Harris said per CNN. “We know what works on this. It includes, let’s have an assault weapons ban.”
“You know what an assault weapon is? You know how an assault weapon was designed?” she continued. “It was designed for a specific purpose — to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war with no place, no place in a civil society.”
