AMY GOODMAN: In Georgia, a 14-year-old student opened fire at the Appalachee High School in the city of Winder Wednesday, killing two students, both also age 14, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie. At least nine other people were wounded and taken to the hospital with injuries. The shooter surrendered to school resource officers immediately when confronted and was taken into custody. He’s facing murder charges as an adult. It marked the deadliest school shooting in the United States this year. Authorities are still looking into how the 14-year-old, Colt Gray, obtained the AR-platform-style weapon used in the shooting.

The teen shooter was on the FBI’s radar as far back as May of last year, after the agency received anonymous tips about online threats to commit an unspecified school shooting. The FBI referred the case to the sheriff’s department in Jackson County. The sheriff’s office interviewed the then-13-year-old boy and his father, who said there were hunting guns in the house, but the teen didn’t have unsupervised access to them. The teen also denied making any online threats. The sheriff’s office alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the teen but said there was no probable cause for arrest.

Appalachee High School also reportedly received a phone threat ahead of Wednesday’s shooting, with the caller warning five schools would be targeted, starting with Appalachee.

We go now to Johns Creek, Georgia, where we’re joined by Georgia state Representative Michelle Au. She introduced a bill in the Georgia House of Representatives last year calling for stricter rules for firearm storage. She’s also a practicing physician in Metro Atlanta.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you start off, Michelle Au, by talking about your response to this horrific event, this attack on the high school, and what you are demanding?

REP. DR. MICHELLE AU: Thank you so much, Amy. And this is a very sad day for all of us here in Georgia and around the country. I think that a lot of us, when we saw the news breaking about the shooting at Appalachee High School, we were shocked, of course, but we were not surprised, because I think that in the United States of America, this type of incident has become really quite routine, right? And the most tragic thing about seeing these types of events happen and hearing that four people were killed and nine people injured is that all these types of events are preventable. In fact, I think we heard, when you were teeing up the story, that there were several points at which we could have intervened or prevented this type of thing from happening, but, nonetheless, we saw it happen yesterday. And it’s an unspeakable tragedy for the community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Representative Au, could you talk about the legislation that you’ve introduced and your hopes of possibly getting passage of that legislation?

REP. DR. MICHELLE AU: Yes. So, last session, I introduced a bill called H.B. 161, which is entitled the Pediatric Health Safe Storage Act. And the reason we called it the Pediatric Health Safe Storage Act is that in the United States of America, gun violence is the number one cause of death in children and teenagers in this country, right? So, that is a statistic that requires not just attention, but action, right?

So, this bill that I introduced is very quite — it’s quite simple. People can look it up. It’s only three pages long. And all it does is it requires that any firearm that can be accessed by a minor, someone 18 or younger, be locked up securely, period. That’s it, right? So, this is the type of legislation that is very straightforward, it’s very logical, and it should have been easy to pass, right? Because I think that we can agree as a society that children and teenagers should not have such easy, unsupervised access to weapons, right?

But there is something about guns in this country that make it very difficult to behave and act on what is essentially a public health issue, a public health crisis. And the fact that this bill got a hearing in the state of Georgia was incredible progress. I think people realize that we do have to start moving on these types of issues. But I was disheartened to see that they would refuse still to bring such a straightforward bill to vote. Of course, now in the aftermath of the shooting, we do wish that this bill had been voted through, because it could have prevented this tragedy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And meanwhile, your governor seems to be going in the opposite direction, Governor Kemp. In 2022, he signed a permitless carry law in Georgia. Could you talk about that?

REP. DR. MICHELLE AU: That’s correct. In the state of Georgia, it is a state with a Republican trifecta. And what that means is that Republicans hold the majority in the House and the Senate, and we have a Republican governor. So, what this has translated to is it’s been quite difficult to move even the most basic type of gun safety legislation. In fact, what we’ve seen is that Georgia actually has some of the most lax gun laws in the country, which is of course correlated with having a very high incidence of preventable gun violence.

Instead of passing the types of commonsense gun safety legislation that I talked about, instead, our Republican governor has championed loosening gun laws. And in 2022, as you noted, he passed S.B. 319, which is a permitless carry law, which enables people to carry loaded weapons in public without any sort of permit. Inherent in the permit is also included a background check. So what we are allowing is taking away a safety net for people to be able to buy guns without a background check, because we know that in America, if you buy guns through private gun sales or transfers, you are not required to go through a federal background check — right? — and also then being able to carry loaded guns in public again without a background check. So we’re really taking away a lot of the safety measures that we can recognize are important when we’re talking about loaded guns in public.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Au, we want to thank you so much for being with us, practicing physician in Atlanta and a member of the Georgia House of Representatives. She introduced a House bill last year for stricter rules for firearm storage.

I want to bring in Kris Brown, president of Brady, one of the oldest gun violence prevention organizations in the United States, named after Jim Brady, who was the press spokesperson for President Ronald Reagan. When there was an attempted assassination of President Reagan, Brady was shot in the head.

Kris Brown, if you can take this story national? Yesterday, when Kamala Harris, running for president, was getting ready to give her economy address in New Hampshire, she had to address this issue, because the shooting had taken place. But I didn’t hear her calling for an assault weapons ban. Can you talk about what Brady is calling for?

KRIS BROWN: Brady has long called for an assault weapons ban. Jim and Sarah Brady are responsible for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was put into effect the year after the Brady Law passed in 1993. During the 10-year time period that that assault weapons ban was in effect, you saw a marked decrease in the kinds of mass shootings involving those firearms than in the previous period. And certainly, in the subsequent period, what you’re seeing is a stark increase of the use of those kinds of firearms, including, reports show, in this particular shooting.

So, we’ll continue to push at the House and Senate in the next session of Congress to pass an assault weapons ban. And I will tell you, across the country — we poll on this; we’ve looked at this over the past many, many years, from really 2018 forward — there is a growing, increasing desire for an assault weapons ban in this country, all across the country, including among Republicans and including among gun owners. So we will certainly push the Harris administration, if we have one, to make that a priority and to call for one, just as Joe Biden always did.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Kris Brown, could you talk about why President Biden has emphasized the need for commonsense gun safety legislation, and yet we continue to have — despite the decline in some influence of the National Rifle Association, we still have no real progress on nationwide legislation? What needs to be done to get Congress to act?

KRIS BROWN: Well, let me push back a little bit. We have had marked progress, thanks to President Joe Biden and his consistent leadership on this issue, for broad and comprehensive gun violence prevention. And he achieved, frankly, the impossible — even I did not think it could happen — which was the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act about two-and-a-half years ago. And just remember, we had 16 Republican members of the United States Senate supporting that law, because it was passed shortly after the horrific school shooting at Uvalde. So we have made progress at the federal level, very important progress, I might add.

But what Joe Biden has had to do as president, because Congress hasn’t acted on some other important things, is pass a number of requirements through executive action. And that’s not the same thing as a congressional law. Those actions, which beef up the enforcement power of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — that’s the agency that regulates the gun dealers all across this country, of which we have more than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined, for example. He has beefed those up. He has regulated ghost guns. Congress should have done it, but he did it. He had ATF pass a rule that provides the most comprehensive expansion of the background check system ever, because Congress still hasn’t expanded the Brady background check system after the loopholes that exist, because you can buy guns online and you can buy them from gun shows.

So, his leadership has been exceptional. I just hope that that leadership continues with the next president. And certainly, if you look at what Kamala Harris typically talks about on the campaign trail, she usually does name gun violence as a top priority issue that she wants to tackle. And she is currently the leader of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an office that Joe Biden created, that is doing incredible work for an all-of-government approach to tackle this epidemic.

AMY GOODMAN: Kris Brown, we only have a minute, but I wanted to go back to 2022 to Republican Congressman Mike Collins, who represents the Georgia district where Appalachee High School is, who posted this video on social media, where he holds and shoots an assault weapon.

REP. MIKE COLLINS: Well, Joe, I’ve got some news for you. Let me tell you what Georgians really believe. First of all, you count the legal votes that were cast in the state of Georgia, Donald Trump won this state, period. … You see, Georgians are sick and tired of weak-kneed, spineless politicians who won’t fight for Trump, get to the bottom of 2020 and fix our elections. Well, if they won’t do it, Mike Collins will.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Republican Congressman Mike Collins, who represents the Georgia district where the massacre just took place yesterday. Your final response?

KRIS BROWN: To some extent, I honestly have no words. What we see there, we see in far too many members of Congress still, people like Lauren Boebert and others, who wear assault weapon pins on the floor of the House of Representatives.

So, I guess my final word is, look, we have children and educators dead today because we have people like Mike Collins in office whose view of the Second Amendment is so extreme that they’re fine with it being a death sentence to their fellow Americans. So I encourage all of us, safely store your guns, please. If you have kids in the home, think about the risks that they pose, or that the — if they’re going through things, and remove guns from the home. And vote for gun-sense candidates. They’re running up and down the ballot, including probably in districts that look a lot like this. And that’s the only way that we will tackle this issue: better people in office, better enforcement of the laws, and changing the gun culture so anyone who has a gun in the home safely stores it. And then we can end this carnage.

AMY GOODMAN: Kris Brown, president of Brady, named for Jim Brady, the White House press spokesperson for President Ronald Reagan, Brady shot in the head during the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

Next up, as university students and professors return to campus for the fall, we look at the crackdown on pro-Palestine students and professors. Stay with us.