The month following the massacre in Parkland, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School held the March For Our Lives, inspiring more than a million Americans across the country to march with them, including me and my family.

With my son Henry on my shoulders, I joined hundreds of El Pasoans fighting to end the epidemic of gun violence that took the lives of nearly 40,000 Americans in 2017.

As we finished marching, we were met by counter-protesters flaunting AR-15s. And when Henry saw them, he asked me why they were there — because, in his mind, assault weapons didn’t belong at a March For Our Lives.

I told him he didn’t have anything to worry about. “Just ignore them,” I said.

But when an alleged white supremacist killed 22 people in my hometown of El Paso with a similar weapon, I realized I was wrong and Henry was right.

You shouldn’t be able to bring a weapon of war to a peaceful protest. Assault weapons like AR-15s and AK-47s, designed to kill people as efficiently and effectively as possible, have no place in our communities — and if we don’t want them to continue showing up in our classrooms, movie theaters, churches, and synagogues, we need to get them off our streets.

That’s a belief I’ve come to after listening to Americans all across the country. People like Cathryn, the student I met in Derry, New Hampshire, who told me she knows exactly which bookshelf to pull down when a gunman comes to her school. People like Jessica Garcia, an AK-47 owner who was injured by the same kind of weapon in the El Paso shooting — and told me she would gladly sell it back. People like the assault weapon owner I met at a gun show in Conway, Arkansas, who defied my expectations and said he’d cut his weapon into pieces if it would help end this epidemic.

That’s why I’ve released the most ambitious plan to end gun violence in our country in this race — proposing not only universal background checks, Extreme Risk Protection Orders (aka, red flag laws), a federal licensing program, and a ban on the sale of assault weapons, but also a mandatory buyback of those weapons of war. It’s why I’ve called on credit card companies and banks to stop facilitating the sale of these weapons. It’s why I am the only candidate in this race to sign onto the March For Our Lives Peace Plan, with the goal of cutting the number of firearm deaths and injuries in half over the next decade.

And it’s why I’m calling on every other candidate in this race — and every member of our party in Congress — to meet the boldness of the American people and sign onto the March For Our Lives Peace Plan.

For too long, our party has chosen to play it safe. To triangulate and poll-test our responses in fear of the NRA. And what do we have to show for it? More than a year after Parkland, seven years after Sandy Hook, and 20 years after Columbine, we have made no progress in the fight against gun violence.

So we’re left with a choice.

We can stick by what we’ve been doing — playing it safe, while we beg Mitch McConnell to take action on the floor of Congress. Or we can follow the lead of the students marching for their lives and for all of ours, who are demanding we do more to protect them.

That means students like the survivors in Parkland, students like Cathryn and my son, Henry.

I choose the kids. And the question I have for my fellow Democrats in this race and in Congress is: Do you?

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