Glenn Thrush and Maggie Astor

The forum, sponsored by two gun control organizations and MSNBC, was intended as a platform for a policy discussion — but it quickly became an outlet for rising anxiety among Democrats who fear the country has grown numb to mass shootings, like the ones that took place during a single August weekend in El Paso, Texas, and in Dayton, Ohio.

“It’s not an intellectual issue,” said Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, speaking to an audience that included the families of some shooting victims. “This is living with a sense of urgency. We cannot wait. This is no time for an impotence of empathy. We cannot wait until this hell is upon your community for you to be activated in this fight.”

For six hours, the event was punctuated by emotional and sometimes graphic descriptions of the horror that fell upon Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017.

Sandra Jauregui, a Nevada assemblywoman who survived the shooting and was co-sponsor of a gun control package passed by the state Legislature this year, said it had taken her months to stop hearing the “ta-ta-ta” of the gunshots. An audience member said she had used her finger to plug a bullet hole in a victim’s head and sat with another victim’s body for five hours, at one point answering his phone to tell his mother he was dead.

Nine candidates participated in the forum, and the party’s increasingly unified support for strict gun control measures, which once splintered Democrats along regional and ideological lines, was on full display.

In a particularly revealing moment, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas accused Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, of being “afraid of doing the right thing” because Buttigieg — like several other candidates, including former housing secretary Julián Castro — supports a voluntary buyback program for assault weapons, not a mandatory one. Just a few years ago, support for even a voluntary buyback would have been bold.

Castro defended his stance, saying that after enacting an assault weapons ban, it would be sufficient to require anyone who kept an assault weapon to register it with the government. And Buttigieg cast mandatory buybacks — which O’Rourke, Booker and Sen. Kamala Harris of California support — as a “shiny object” whose pursuit might sabotage a rare opportunity to pass new gun laws.

Many policies that would have been politically impossible before now have majority support, Buttigieg said. “We can get background checks done now,” he said. “We can get red flag laws done now. We can get something done about the new sale of assault weapons now. We cannot wait for these other debates to play out, even if they’re healthy debates.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden devoted much of his time to promoting the gun plan he released Wednesday morning; he had, until now, been one of the few candidates without one.

In addition to two policies supported by every Democrat in the race — universal background checks and an assault weapons ban — Biden called for a voluntary buyback program and a ban on online gun sales. That is an unusual proposal; for the most part, other candidates have called only for restrictions on online sales, not a wholesale prohibition.

Biden also called for financial incentives to encourage states to enact gun licensing programs, but stopped short of endorsing a national licensing requirement, in contrast to most of his opponents. That could be a big dividing line: Booker, who was the first candidate to propose a federal licensing requirement, said unprompted on Wednesday that anyone who did not support such a requirement “should not be a nominee from our party.”

The entrepreneur Andrew Yang offered his own twist on a licensing requirement: a “tiered” system in which different licenses would be required for different weapons, much as a truck driver needs to meet more stringent licensing requirements than a regular passenger-car driver.

Several candidates, particularly Harris and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, emphasized the steps they intended to take through executive action, especially if Republicans keep their Senate majority.

“A president herself,” Klobuchar said, can close loopholes in the background check system and direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the causes of, and most effective solutions to, gun violence. “You can do all this without Congress.”

“I’m so done with this subject,” she said. “We just need action, and if the Congress is not going to act, then a president must.”

When the moderator, Craig Melvin, asked if she was concerned that a future Republican president could undo executive actions, Harris responded sharply.

“Craig,” she said, “I will deal with that in eight years.”

In comparison to the other candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts chose to focus not on the details of her plan, but on reviving her call to investigate the National Rifle Association and on hammering the overarching idea of her campaign: The country’s many problems can all be traced to a common corrupting source.

“This is not ultimately about guns. It’s about money, and it’s about who makes money off the system as it is,” Warren said. “This is a fundamental question about who Washington works for.”

On average, she and others noted, 100 people die from gun violence every day in the United States. “If 100 people were dying from a mysterious virus, we would be all over this,” Warren said, “but because it is guns — because it is so twisted into the political corruption — people don’t want to ask that question. We need to treat gun violence like the public health emergency it is and respond with the kind of strength it demands.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont had been expected to attend the forum, but had to cancel after being hospitalized for a heart procedure.

The candidates spent part of their time onstage defending the constitutionality of their proposals and denouncing the idea that restrictions on gun ownership are an inherent violation of the Second Amendment.

“The president of the United States has to stand up to the NRA and say, ‘Enough is enough,’” Harris said. “‘I’m not going to any longer accept your false choice that you’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everybody’s guns away.’”

Americans have long since decided “that within the boundaries of the Second Amendment, that there’s a line,” Buttigieg said in calling for an assault weapons ban. “Anyone can have a water balloon. Nobody can have a Predator drone.”

While the event — sponsored by March for Our Lives and Giffords, the gun control group of which former Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona is a co-founder — included plenty of discussion of policy details and differences, the underlying theme seemed to be something more: a unanimous vow, among the Democratic candidates, to treat the issue with far more urgency than President Donald Trump has.

“We must never stop fighting — fight, fight, fight!” said Giffords, who nearly died after being shot in the head during a constituent meet-and-greet in 2011.

Taking the stage once more, briefly, at the end of the event, she gave the candidates and the audience a directive: “Get ’er done.”

This article originally appeared in

2020 Democrats Call for Gun Control in Las Vegas, 2 Years After Mass Shooting There

LAS VEGAS — The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates expressed their collective support Wednesday for sweeping new gun control measures, appearing at a forum in a city still grieving after a gunman massacred 58 concertgoers two years and one day ago.

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2020 Democrats Call for Gun Control in Las Vegas, 2 Years After Mass Shooting There