Reflecting on Virginia shooting, Sonoma County congressmen say gun violence threatens everyone

On Capitol Hill, guarded by uniformed and plainclothes police, Rep. Jared Huffman said he feels fairly safe, despite the menacing telephone and email messages he and his staff receive from apparently unstable people who threaten violence or seem prone to it.

“They say some pretty crazy things,” he said, acknowledging the threats from people Huffman described as “fanatics with guns.”

But the mass shooting Wednesday that injured Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise and four others on a Virginia baseball field illustrated how tenuous safety can be for lawmakers away from their protective ?bubble in Washington, D.C.

If not for the two Capitol Police officers accompanying Scalise, the third-ranking House Republican leader, the armed assault by a semi-retired man with a political rage would likely have been a far worse bloodbath.

Rank and file members of Congress like Huffman have no such security, nor do the five district offices scattered across Huffman’s sprawling North Coast district, in Eureka, Fort Bragg, Ukiah, Petaluma and San Rafael.

“The real risk here is your district staff,” Huffman said. “I do worry about them.”

Those offices rely on local law enforcement and the watchful eyes of neighbors for their protection, he said.

The rising animus of debate in a politically divided nation also affords no comfort for family members like Susan Huffman, who got a startling wake-up message from her husband before dawn Wednesday at their San Rafael home, where their two children were asleep.

“I didn’t want her to awake to the news that congressmen had been shot,” Jared Huffman said.

His call was reassuring, but the couple live with the reality that his job makes him a target for angry people with grievances.

Sonoma County’s two congressmen, Huffman and Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, both stressed in interviews after Wednesday’s shooting that irate people with guns are just as much a threat to the general public as they are to political leaders.

Unprovoked mass killings have occurred in recent years at U.S. schools, nightclubs, cinemas, neighborhoods and churches, Huffman noted. “We’re all in this together,” Huffman said.

“We live in a pretty open society,” Thompson said Thursday, a day after shocking assaults on the suburban Virginia baseball field and a UPS facility in San Francisco, where a gunman killed three fellow employees before taking his own life. “We’re all vulnerable.”

Thompson, who has chaired the House Democrats task force on gun violence since 2012, once again cited the statistic that 30 people a day in the nation are slain by someone else using a gun.

The online Gun Violence Archive said 6,913 men, women and children have been killed this year nationwide.

Thompson said he didn’t know if Wednesday’s carnage would change any minds in the debate over gun control, one of the more fractious issues in a time of increasingly belligerent political discourse.

“I would have thought that 20 kids killed at Sandy Hook would have (made a difference),” he said, referring to mass shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school in 2012. “But I was wrong.”

The person who opened fire on a Republican baseball practice Wednesday, critically wounding Scalise and injuring four other people, was an unemployed Illinois man who enthusiastically supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary last year and advocated impeachment of President Donald Trump.

James Hodgkinson, 66, was shot and killed by two Capitol Police officers at the scene. He was armed with a military-style rifle and a handgun.

Thompson said he talked Thursday with Republican colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee who told him that all the people on the ballfield in Alexandria would have died if not for the presence of the Capitol Hill police officers, who engaged in a gun battle with the shooter.

“These guys had no place to go,” Thompson said.

One officer, Crystal Griner, who was struck in the ankle, kept firing as she leaned against a vehicle, wincing in pain when she weighted the wounded leg, he said.

Huffman, who plays for the Democrats’ baseball team, was at a practice field in Washington - preparing for the 80th Congressional Baseball Game on Thursday night - when gunfire erupted shortly after 7 a.m. Wednesday at the GOP practice field about eight miles away.

Huffman and the other Democrats were herded into a dugout by two Capitol Hill officers who attend practices. They kept the team sheltered until additional law enforcement arrived.

Huffman said death threats were rare during the six years he served in the California Assembly, but the volume and tenor of phone calls and emails ramped up with his election to Congress in 2012.

“You’re dealing with superheated subjects that people are really passionate about,” Huffman said.

He recalled a flurry of threats following his introduction of an amendment last year to remove Confederate flags from cemeteries operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Some threats included “pretty graphic detail about what they’d wanted to do to me,” he said. Most of the threats - via email and social media - came from Southern states, but a few were from Huffman’s North Coast district, including Sonoma County.

Thompson, who was in the House gym at the Capitol when the shooting occurred, said he received a text regarding an “active shooter,” and quickly got calls from his wife, Janet, a son, nephew and a brother.

On Thursday, Thompson said he called a Napa woman who works at the UPS facility in San Francisco where the mass shooting occurred.

“It is heavy on the minds and souls of everybody in that office,” he said.

One of the victims was a constituent and former resident of Santa Rosa: 46-year-old UPS driver Mike Lefiti of Hercules.

The two tragedies this week may buttress Thompson’s appeal for a bipartisan select committee to consider responses to gun violence, he said. It could be established by his legislation or unilaterally by House Speaker Paul Ryan.

The Virgina shooting generated “a moment of reflection, of unity” in Congress, Huffman said, but he doubts it will “change any minds” in the gun control debate.

Republicans will stick to their argument that “we need more people with guns” to deter gun violence, and some want the District of Columbia to allow concealed carry of weapons, he said.

“We do need to keep having a conversation about assault weapons and gun violence,” Huffman said. “But it’s also about mental health.”

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.