Hillary Clinton meets with mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown
On Monday, Hillary Clinton met with the families of several African-American teenagers and children who died in shootings to discuss their experiences and her plans for "commonsense" gun control.
Clinton spent more than two hours in Chicago meeting with more than a dozen mothers who lost their children to gun violence, including the mothers of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old killed in 2012 in Florida by former neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman; Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old killed in a 2014 shooting that started with a complaint about loud music; Michael Brown, the 18-year-old killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in a shooting that sparked unrest in the town; and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old shot and killed by police in Cleveland while carrying an airsoft gun.
Clinton's campaign says that as president, Clinton would "act on gun violence and will work to improve relations between law enforcement officials and the communities they serve." She also believes "commonsense gun reforms" like background checks for online sales and closing certain loopholes will keep guns "out of the hands of the criminals and the violently unstable," the campaign added. While Clinton didn't make any promises, the women told CNN, she did say she would work on criminal justice reform. "She is a mother and she is a woman and I felt she understood where we are coming from," Samaria Rice, Tamir Rice's mother, told CNN. "It doesn't matter what color we are, I felt that she really understood where we are coming from." Later, Clinton tweeted she was "grateful to spend time today with mothers who have lost a child to violence and turned their grief into a national call to action."
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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