An emotional Hillary Clinton on Saturday called for more gun control in the wake of the deadly Charleston, South Carolina church shooting that left nine dead earlier this week.
“This generation will not be shackled by fear and hate,” she said to applause at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco.
“We can have common sense gun reforms that keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and the violently unstable while respecting owners,” said Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination. “The stakes are too high, the costs are too dear, and I am not and will not be afraid to keep fighting for common sense reforms and along with you, achieve those on behalf of all who have been lost because of this senseless gun violence in this country.”
Clinton also said race remains “a deep fault line in America.”
“Bodies are once again being carried out of black churches. Once again, racist rhetoric has metastasized into racist violence,” Clinton said. “Now it is tempting, it is tempting, to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident. To believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite out best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.”
Clinton has made addressing race issues a staple of her campaign since she announced her candidacy in April.
Weeks after she formally announced her campaign, Clinton called for mandatory body cameras on police and the end of the “era of mass incarceration.” Clinton told an audience in New York that it was time for the United States to come to terms with “unmistakable and undeniable” racial patterns in policing.
“As a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families,” Clinton said, listing a number of incidents in the last year that have seen black men killed at the hands of law enforcement. “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”
When the former first lady traveled to South Carolina — an early voting state — for the first time, she focused her trip on minority women small business owners.
And earlier this week in an interview in Las Vegas, Clinton called for “a candid national conversation about race and about discrimination, prejudice, hatred” in the wake of the Charleston shooting.
Clinton’s aides argue that her outspokenness on race and crime follow her history as someone who stands up for the oppressed. But the policy positions also have political benefits and help the Democratic frontrunner keep together the diverse coalition of voters that helped President Barack Obama win the White House.
African-American voters flocked to Obama during the 2008 nomination fight. The 2008 fight for South Carolina took a racial turn, too, and damaged Clinton with some in the community.
But 2016 is not 2008. Obama won’t be on the ballot and some of the President’s most vocal African-American supporters from 2008, like South Carolina’s Edith Childs, have already joined Clinton’s nascent campaign.
“There is a time and a season for everything. That was his time,” Childs said during Clinton’s first trip to South Carolina.
Childs became famous for coining the chant “fired up, ready to go,” a phrase that followed Obama from South Carolina in 2007 all the way to the White House. Childs appeared next to Obama — and against Clinton — a number of times during the 2008 primary fight. Now, though, she is ready for Hillary.
“She is a woman and she can handle the job,” Childs said. “And she knows what we need especially as a woman because a lot of times men forget what we need. With her being a woman, she knows exactly what we need.”