Duckworth Holds Video Call With Highland Park High School Students

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — Earlier this week, U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth held a video call with students from Highland Park High School to hear their accounts of the July 4th mass shooting.

Duckworth's office noted the meeting coincided with the week of the 10th anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

“What the Highland Park community has gone through, what these students have gone through, is heartbreaking, senseless and not reflective of the kind of future our young people deserve,” Duckworth said in a statement.

“And yet, these high schoolers and their teachers still have the courage and dedication to call for more comprehensive gun reform."

The Illinois Democrat and combat veteran has long been a supporter of a ban on assault-style weapons like the AR-15 and similar semiautomatic rifles.

"From their portability, accuracy, rate of fire ability to penetrate certain body armor and ease of reloading, both the military-issued M4 Carbine and the civilian AR-15, and its variants, are functionally similar and they are designed for combat. The lack of a three-round burst or full-auto mechanism does not meaningfully reduce the AR-15's lethality compared to the M4," Duckworth testified at a Senate hearing following the Highland Park massacre.

"Whether it's a soldier engaging the enemy in combat, or an untrained mass murderer hunting children in a school — any shooter — any shooter looking to efficiently kill multiple people without wasting ammunition will prefer a semi-auto rifle coupled with a detachable large-capacity magazine that enables rapid reloading," the senator added.

Earlier this year, a proposal to revive the federal ban on such firearms that expired in 2004 passed the House of Representatives.

But it has stalled in the evenly divided Senate and is expected to die after this month's lame-duck session.

In Illinois, a statewide ban on assault-style weapons is included in House Bill 5855, the Protecting Illinois Communities Act. Hearings on that bill began this week and are scheduled to continue Tuesday.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has said he hopes to be able to sign the bill, sponsored by State Rep. Bob Morgan (D-Highwood), by the first anniversary of the Highland Park parade shooting.

Duckworth has previously met with mothers from the Highland Park area, survivors of the shooting and area residents to hear their personal experiences, according to her office.

After her meeting with the Highland Park High School students, Duckworth pledged to continue to push for an end to the sale of assault weapons, which she describes as "weapons of war."

"I was proud to meet with them," she said, "and I’m continuing to call for a national assault weapons ban so that we, as a country, can prevent this kind of horrific tragedy in the future.”