Mark Warner says no ‘single piece of legislation’ would have stopped Texas school shooting

Sen. Mark Warner says there isn’t one piece of legislation that would have prevented the school shooting Friday in Santa Fe, Texas.

“I don’t think there’s a single piece of legislation, but there’s a series of actions,” Mr. Warner said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Are there things we can do that would improve the safety of our schools? Absolutely.”

The Virginia Democrat advocated better mental health counselling for troubled teenagers, ensuring parents store their firearms more carefully and “reasonable and logical restraints on gun ownership.”

He acknowledged that the alleged Santa Fe shooter did not use a “military-style weapon,” but said controls on such weapons may prevent similar tragedies in the future.

“Might not have affected this tragedy, but potentially others,” Mr. Warner said. “The fact that we should—and this was not a case where there was an assault-style weapon, but the fact that we’re the only industrial nation in the world that allows these military-style assault weapons to populate throughout our whole society.”

Mr. Warner said the “epidemic” of school shootings “seems to have gotten much worse in the last 10 years.”

But research shows that violence in schools has been declining for decades, along with the overall U.S. crime rate, and nearly four times as many students were killed in schools in the early 1990s as today.

Ten students were killed and 13 injured Friday when Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, allegedly opened fire on his classmates at Santa Fe High School in Texas.

Mr. Warner implored his fellow members of Congress to take action on guns.

“But please for those folks that I work with in the Congress, take a moment and let your position evolve,” he said. “I mean, there are ways that we can put reasonable restrains without dramatically interfering with people’s Second Amendment rights.”