Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) Thursday urged Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to get her school safety commission back together and make another try, this time focusing on the role of guns in school shootings.
Warren and Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), the House Democratic Caucus vice chairwoman, blasted the commission's December report as "toothless" in a letter to DeVos on the one-year anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that spurred the creation of the Federal Commission on School Safety.
They urged DeVos to reopen the commission and "re-examine the danger that gun violence poses to our nation's children and the solutions to this violence in our schools and on our streets."
Their letter comes after President Donald Trump earlier Thursday toutedthe report among other things as evidence that "we have made tremendous strides" since the shooting in Parkland.
"Your commission issued a toothless report that ignored and evaded the serious problems facing our children today," the lawmakers wrote, noting semi-automatic weapons have been used in multiple school shootings "yet your 180-page report does not contain a single instance of the words 'semi-automatic,' 'automatic,' or 'AR-15' in reference to weapons."
They also complained that the report did not call for raising the legal age to buy guns, despite the fact that "the shooter in Parkland, Florida purchased a long gun as an 18-year-old, and hundreds of school shootings have been committed by teens."
The Trump administration report endorsed the adoption by states of "extreme risk protection orders" designed to temporarily restrict access to firearms by individuals found to be a danger to themselves or others and encouraged Congress to modernize privacy laws.
"The report's recommendations fly in the face of common sense and available evidence," Clark and Warren objected. "In light of the continued threats facing our schools, our communities, and our children, we urge you to re-open the Commission to more fully examine the evidence that access to firearms contributes to the high rate of gun violence in the United States, and particularly to the dangers facing schools."
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