Obama administration Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Friday for pulling students out of school until gun laws change, and Monday, he doubled down in an MSNBC interview.
In light of the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, Duncan argued that America must "think radically different than we ever have" on gun control. He said that only increased political pressure can create the necessary breakthrough to make schools safe from shooters.
"As adults, we're failing to keep our kids safe. We have to create a level of tension, honestly, that will help us break through politically," he said.
Duncan said teenagers are leading the charge to finally stand up to lawmakers and bring about the widespread public desire for new gun control laws.
"There is not a lack of public will; there is a lack of political leadership. The politicians are way behind where the public is," he said. "The public's now speaking up, led by our teens, saying ‘We're not going to stand by.’ People are finding their voice and they are going to vote."
He said politicians who do not support gun control ought to "pay a price at the voting booth," and he specifically named the November midterm elections as the time for that.
"Everybody goes to the voting booth in November and politicians who have refused to move, refused to listen, have to pay a price at the voting booth," he said.
He also said the NRA is behind Republican proposals to focus on mental health as a way of preventing future shootings.
Duncan said he did not want to repeal the Second Amendment but, instead, to find a way to drastically reduce legal gun ownership in order to have "less guns."
"The answer is not more guns; it is less guns," he said. "And fewer guns in the hands of people who should not have them."
As Duncan described it, no other "civilized nation" has problems with gun violence like the U.S. does.
"This is a made-in-America issue. You can draw a direct line to the number of guns we have, the easy access, the easy availability to guns and the number ever children and adults who get killed every single year," he said.
When pressed for specific proposals, Duncan named "universal background checks, restricting weapons of war, doing research into the impact on gun violence."
Tur and Duncan also discussed how one of the survivors in Santa Fe said she knew her school would be attacked because she had seen other shootings occur around the country. Tur said her mother-in-law, a teacher, had a "sense of inevitability" that her school would eventually see a mass shooting, even though they are exceedingly rare.
Duncan also used legislation of automobiles as an example of how driving has been made safer through licensing, speed bumps, and speed limits. He did not mention that Americans are still far more likely to die in automobile deaths than in a shooting. In 2017, the number of automobile deaths vastly exceeded the number of gun homicides; there were about 40,100 automobile deaths in the U.S. in 2017, while the estimated number of gun homicides in 2016 was 11,008, in addition to the 21,386 suicides with a gun.
School shootings specifically constitute a much smaller total number of deaths, and the prevalence of school shootings has gone down since the 1990s.