Kamala Harris went to Buffalo on Saturday to speak at a service for Ruth Whitfield, who was killed during the Tops Market shooting two weeks ago. Ruth Whitfield was the woman who was visiting her husband in the nursing home — something she did every day — and stopped into the market to get something to eat on her way home.

That’s good that Harris went. But while she was there, she linked a lot of things under the umbrella of “hate.”

“There’s a through line, what happened here in Buffalo, in Texas, in Atlanta, in Orlando, what happened at the synagogues. So this is a moment that requires all good people who are loving people to just say we will not stand for this,” she said.

“Enough is enough. We will come together based on what we all know we have in common and we will not let those people who are motivated by hate separate us or make us feel fear,” she said.

She told the congregation that “We are strong in our belief about what is right and our determination to act, to ensure that we protect all those who deserve to be protected, that we see all those who deserve to be seen, that we hear the voices of the people and that we rise up in solidarity to speak out against this and to speak to our better angels.”

But all those situations are not the same, although she suggests they are. If you didn’t know better, you might think she’s saying they are all white supremacist attacks or hate crime attacks because of her language, which is not the case. Uvalde, for example, may be an evil person and it might be “hate” in the sense that he wanted to shoot a lot of people. But it wasn’t based on race, religion, or anything of that nature, as far as we know. Biden was similarly imprecise on this during his remarks in Delaware on Saturday.

Harris continued with that kind of language in her remarks after the service, as she called for an assault weapons ban.

Harris claimed that there had already been “200 mass shootings” this year so far.

“When we’re looking at an epidemic of hate, where people are being targeted, just because of who they are,” she said. “We all have to stand back and say, wait, enough is enough. A harm against anyone is a harm against all of us. No one should be left to fight alone. We’ve got to deal with this.”

“We have to deal with it in a number of ways,” she said. “I went through it even at the church, you look at it, from Buffalo, to what’s happened – the babies, and the teacher that’s been killed in Texas. The funerals haven’t even really begun in terms of mourning that loss.”

“We’re looking at, on the heels of Atlanta, just a year ago, Orlando, the Tree of Life,” she went on. “We have to agree that if we are to be strong as a nation, we must stand strong, identifying our diversity as our unity. Anyone who’s trying to break that down is hurting us as a country and as individuals who should identify as one, as a country, as Americans.”

Once again, she’s suggesting they’re all “hate crimes” having to do with “diversity” or people being targeted because of “who they are.” That’s not just a distortion of Uvalde and Orlando, for example, it’s a distortion of most of the mass shootings. The 200 number is also questionable.

But Harris continued, saying, “We are not sitting around, waiting to figure out what the solution looks like.”

“We’re not looking for a vaccine. We know what works on this. It includes let’s have an assault weapons ban.”

“You know an assault weapon is? You know how it’s designed? It’s designed for a specific purpose,” she said. “To kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war. With no place, no place in a civil society.”

“Background checks,” she added. “Why should anyone be able to buy a weapon that can kill other human beings without at least knowing, ‘hey, has that person committed a violent crime before?’ Are they a threat to them or others? That’s reasonable. That’s just reasonable.”

“We do that so you have to have a license to drive a car. You have to be of a certain age to buy a six pack. We are a society that is governed by rules, most of which were designed, those rules, at the very height of the purpose, to prevent against harm, to promote safety, and to have a common order that we all agree in civilized society, that we should agree to… There will be safety, and we can prevent chaos.”

The problem is that the assault weapons ban didn’t work, and it’s the New York Times saying it.

“The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference,” Lois Beckett reported for The New York Times years ago:

It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.

In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
[…]
“Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” a Department of Justice-funded evaluation concluded.

Further, an AR-15 isn’t an assault weapon, and it isn’t a weapon of war. The shooters in Uvalde and Buffalo both passed background checks. So, how is what she’s saying going to prevent anything?

That’s the thing. There’s a lot of shouting about gun control but not a lot of things that provide solutions. Democrats don’t want to discuss school security or things that might help. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) shut down a school security measure. Why would you do that if you want to address the question? Because they only want to talk about what serves the narrative: gun control.