Sacramento, CA…We are appalled by the politically motivated murders of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and the attempted murders of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife on the morning of Saturday, June 14. We grieve for the victims, for their families, for the people of state of Minnesota, and for our entire country.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the hypocrisy of President Donald Trump’s statement in response to the Minnesota shootings that, “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America.” Trump was clearly involved in inciting the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in which four participants died during the attack, three law enforcement officers died subsequently as an indirect result of the attack, at least 140 other law enforcement officers were injured (including suffering broken bones and traumatic brain injuries); and the lives of Vice President Pence and all members of Congress were seriously threatened.

Trump “tweeted” to his followers on December 19, 2020, that it was “Statistically impossible” that he’d lost the 2020 presidential election; that there would be a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6,” the day that Congress and Vice President Pence would certify the election results; and that his supporters should “Be there, will be wild!” In a speech in front of the White House immediately preceding the January 6, 2021 riot, Trump urged a large crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

As rioters were breaking into the Capitol and chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump inflamed them still further by tweeting that the election results that Pence and Congress were in the process of certifying were “fraudulent and inaccurate” and that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” (e.g., declare Trump the winner of the election instead of Biden). Trump waited for more than three hours into the attack on the Capitol to post a video message urging the rioters to go home, but even then, he repeated the false claims that the election was not only “stolen,” but that he’d won by a “landslide,” and he told the rioters “We love you, you’re very special.”

On Trump’s first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers during the attack and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.

On February 7, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14206, “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” As a direct result of this order, federally licensed firearm dealers who have had their licenses preciously revoked for willful violations of federal law, including selling guns without background checks, may now apply to have their licenses restored.

The first section of Trump’s Executive Order 14206 states:

The Second Amendment is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty. It has preserved the right of the American people to protect ourselves, our families, and our freedoms since the founding of our great Nation. Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.

The Second Amendment itself states:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Prior to 2008, the Second Amendment had never been interpreted by the Supreme Court or, with two rare exceptions, by any federal appeals court as conferring an individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” On the contrary, the Supreme Court had stated in four previous cases that the Second Amendment did not confer such a right. Historians and linguists also noted that the term, “bear arms,” had been used almost universally throughout American history to refer to carrying weapons of war in the setting of military service.

In 2008, however, in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, a narrow 5-4 majority of Supreme Court justices reversed over two centuries of legal precedent by ruling that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to private gun ownership unrelated to militia service. In doing so, the Heller majority effectively allowed the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment. The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had previously called the gun lobby’s revisionist history version of the Second Amendment “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud” – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime.

There is overwhelming evidence that guns in the homes and in the communities of honest, law-abiding Americans are far more likely to harm them than to protect them. There is also overwhelming evidence from the history of politically motivated shootings in our country that widespread civilian gun ownership is a threat to democracy, not a safeguard. The rate of private gun ownership, and correspondingly, the rate of gun-related deaths in our country, greatly exceeds the rates in other countries that are currently far more democratic than the United States of America.

We at Americans Against Gun Violence are relieved that the alleged gunman in the Minnesota shootings has been captured – but only temporarily relieved. The Heller decision and its progeny are literally death sentences for tens of thousands of Americans annually, and these decisions also threaten the survival of American democracy. We know that until we reverse the Heller decision and its progeny and adopt stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, including a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic long guns (including so-called assault rifles), mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, will continue to occur on a regular basis, more than 120 people will continue to die of gunshot wounds on an average day in our country, and that the survival of American democracy itself will be in peril.