Yalie Saweda Kamara

Because Harris presides over the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention

Vice President Kamala Harris seems to always be around me. If it isn’t receiving business checks with her first name mistaken for my last, or answering calls in which the voice on the other end asks, “Am I speaking to Dr. Kamala?” Harris is far from neither sight nor sound. She is also never too far from home: she and I come from immigrant families who made their lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. As we are both “Daughters of Oakland,” I imagine that home has informed our personhoods in similar ways. The boldness that permeates the Town’s culture (think “hella,” MC Hammer pants, and rocky road ice cream) also fuels our longstanding allegiance to all manner of civil rights, self-determination, justice, and progressive action. But in spite of Oakland’s passion for life, it is not immune to one of our nation’s endemic diseases: gun violence.

A few snapshots paint a grim picture of what our hometown is up against—between 2019 and 2020, nearly 90 percent of the city’s homicides were caused by guns; in 2022, Wilma Chan Highland Hospital provided aid to over five hundred gunshot victims; and in the span of one hour on the morning of June 10, 2024, three teenagers lost their lives to the hands of bullets again. Oakland’s bloodshed is not isolated, but rather a microcosm—a small sampling of our nation’s gaping wound.

What I am trying to say is, in 2023, gun violence on American soil claimed the lives of 46,728 individuals. We are living in devastation.

I have been enraged, disgusted, and disheartened by the historically staid and impotent discourse around America’s gun culture and the pervasiveness of its firearms. This series of aimless and nebulous conversations—which are, in their own way, a form of violence—showcases our government’s unwillingness to engage with the cruelty of avoidable death. Out of Kamala Harris’s political platforms, I am most taken by her clear stance on gun reform, one that leads with both logic and nuance.

Under the Biden administration, Harris presides over the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Chief among its goals is to eradicate the availability of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines as well as an enforcement of background checks for all gun sales. To add to this demonstrated history of gun control, Kamala Harris’s presidential platform has more than an eye to the banning of assault weapons. Equally critical of handguns, Harris appreciates the frequency of their unlawful purchases. The “gun show loophole,” as she calls it, takes into account the number of unregistered handguns that lead to unsolved homicides. And here’s a little something for the fearmongers eager to create hysteria around Harris’s reform policy: Kamala Harris herself is a gun owner. A little more proof that this issue is being handled with the gravity and intentionality that it deserves.

I reflect on these words as I’m on my way to teach at a liberal arts college in Ohio. While the campus is gun free, it is but an island in an open-carry state. I think of the weight of this generation’s anxieties and the elements that contaminate their understanding of what they deserve in an educational setting—it should be our collective shame that active shooter drills are as commonplace as learning the alphabet and times table. Earning diplomas and degrees may include the experience of barricading oneself in a classroom. We are connected by a collective trauma that doesn’t have to be—it is my hope and belief that Kamala Harris will lead the charge in resisting domestic warfare. May the spilling of blood be more than just that—Aurora, Colorado; Pulse nightclub; Allen, Texas; Sandy Hook Elementary; Parkland High School; Columbine High School; Uvalde, Texas, and countless other atrocities—may we return to these massacres to inspire our determination to fight for life. May we never forget that this is the minimum that we are owed.

Yalie Saweda Kamara, PhD, is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. She is the current Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and author of the debut full-length collection Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024). She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.