Page 37 of 107 Days

Because I am passionate about small business, when I became VP, the first meeting I scheduled outside of government departments was with small-business owners, and right after that with the CEOs of big banks to persuade them to do more small-business lending.

It’s the biggest engine of employment in our economy.

But it is even more than that. Small businesses are the glue that holds communities together: the café where the barista knows you, the local pharmacist who asks after your kid’s earache or sore throat.

When I was a child, before my mother saved enough for a down payment on our first home, we rented an apartment above Mrs. Shelton’s nursey, and Mrs. Shelton looked after us while Mommy worked.

She became a second mother to us. And she taught me early that the best business leaders are also civic leaders.

Small businesses like Mrs. Shelton’s represent the realization of millions of individual American dreams.

Apalachee High School had just about every recommended security measure.

Three armed officers on-site, self-locking classroom doors, smart boards programmed to flash an active shooter alert in every classroom, teachers whose high-tech ID badges included a panic button and real-time location software.

It wasn’t enough.

You can buy a semiautomatic weapon in Georgia without a permit or any gun-safety training. Just weeks before the shooting, state lawmakers tried to pass a law offering a $300 tax credit for installing a gun safe. Even that modest proposal failed to pass.

We are the only country in the world where the leading cause of death for children is guns. Every day in America there are parents who drop their kids off at the bus stop or at the school gate and say a silent prayer that their children will return home that day.

As I set out for New Hampshire that morning, I’d only had a bare-bones briefing.

I didn’t yet have all the details on the shooting.

I didn’t yet know that the shooter’s father had given his son a semiautomatic AR-15-style weapon as a Christmas gift, even though his boy had a picture of the Parkland school shooter on his bedroom wall and had been visited by police regarding threats he allegedly posted on Discord.

What I did know: It doesn’t have to be this way.

As VP I drove the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which led to the first major gun-safety bill in nearly three decades, looking at gun trafficking and the training of fourteen thousand new mental health workers to work in schools like Apalachee and help avert such tragedies. But we need to do much more.

As a gun owner myself, I am not coming to take away anybody’s guns. I am with the majority of Americans who want an assault weapons ban. I am with those who want universal background checks and red flag laws.

You just might want to know, before someone can buy a lethal weapon, if they’ve been convicted of a violent crime.

You just might want to know if the person buying a gun is a danger to themselves or others.

All of us certainly want to know our children can go to school, learn without fear, and come home safe.

As a prosecutor, I’d studied autopsy photographs in the aftermath of shootings.

I know exactly what semiautomatic rifle fire does to the human body, especially to the tiny body of a child.

This may sound harsh, but somebody needs to get lawmakers in a locked room and make them look at those images.

Then they can go out on the floor of the chamber and vote their conscience.

In a statement that day, Donald Trump blamed the shooting on a “sick and deranged monster.” He did not mention the gun.

Every country in the world has sick and deranged individuals. Only the United States had eighty-three school shootings in 2024.