Washington:

US Vice President Kamala Harris took on a brand new function Friday combating Gun Violence, a job seemingly to offer her extra visibility forward of the 2024 election. The 58-year-old Democrat will head up the brand new White Home Workplace of Gun Violence Prevention, which is able to present coordination on the difficulty however largely lacks any type of enforceable energy to sort out the scourge in a rustic that has extra firearms than folks. 

“We all know true freedom will not be attainable if individuals are not protected,” Harris stated in an announcement asserting the brand new workplace. 

“We should not have a second to spare nor a life to spare” whereas america is “torn aside” by gun violence, she stated on the White Home on Friday. 

“After each mass taking pictures, we hear a easy message, the identical message everywhere in the nation,” she added, saying Individuals are begging for his or her leaders to “‘do one thing, please do one thing.'”

Regardless of the brand new push, the White Home doesn’t have unilateral energy to meaningfully restrict gun use in america, similar to by banning assault weapons. 

Any substantial strikes must come from Congress, the place fiercely anti-gun regulation Republicans management the Home of Representatives. 

Biden has due to this fact tried to work round legislative necessities and imposed sure regulatory and administrative restrictions, which have solely a restricted scope. 

The brand new function provides a big job to Harris’s portfolio just a bit over a yr forward of the 2024 race, by which she and the 80-year-old president are dealing with re-election. 

The vp has already been tasked with dealing with different politically delicate points similar to immigration. 

Tackling gun violence provides the previous California prosecutor the possibility to work on a visual situation that always garners extra widespread consensus from the American public. 

In response to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-governmental group, 44,374 folks have been killed by weapons throughout america final yr.

Gun deaths have slowed barely this yr, at 28,793 for the primary eight months, based on the archive.

Harris — the primary girl to develop into vp in addition to the primary Black individual and individual of South Asian descent to carry the job — additionally just lately launched into the so-called Combat for Our Freedoms School Tour, by which she visited a number of US universities. 

She was typically acquired with enthusiasm, in distinction to her often-flagging favorability ballot numbers. 

(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)