Too radical? Too moderate? With Warnock, it depends on whom you ask

ATLANTA — Just hours before yet another mass shooting in America, this one taking the lives of three people on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in December, Raphael Warnock took to the Senate floor to deliver both a lament about the scourge of gun violence and a rebuke of Congress for doing little to prevent it.

He decried the seeming regularity of such armed rampages in America. As a pastor, he said, he had prayed for those touched by other tragedies, including one at an office building inMidtown Atlanta in May. But thoughts and prayers, Georgia’s “senator-reverend” continued, were simply not enough.

He implored his Senate colleagues to resist the partisanship preventing changes to gun laws and to pass legislation that requires universal background checks for gun buyers, a measure he said most Americans support.

“I think the unspoken assumption is that this will not visit me; it will not happen to my family,” he said. “When you consider that there have been 630 mass shootings already this year, sadly, the chances are quite good that this could visit any one of us. And we ought to do our work here in the Congress as if we are protecting our own families.”

That speech by Warnock rang out in a mostly empty Senate chamber. But that didn’t matter. He wasn’t addressing just his fellow senators.