[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 57 (Wednesday, May 8, 2002)]
[House]
[Page H2213]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      GUN AMNESTY ON MOTHER'S DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, Members are coming to the floor as we 
approach Mother's Day. I am coming as well. Many mark Mother's Day in 
their own ways, very diverse ways. But if we ask the mothers of the 
Nation what would they most want for Mother's Day, the choice of many 
would be gun safety legislation to protect their children. The proof, 
of course, is that 2 years ago on Mother's Day, almost a million 
mothers and their families used Mother's Day to come to their Nation's 
capital to work productively for just such legislation. We do not yet 
have the gun safety legislation for our children these mothers so 
desperately wanted, but in recognition of Mother's Day this year, I 
thought that it would behoove me to introduce a realistic piece of gun 
safety legislation, recognizing that in many ways this issue has been 
off the radar screen, to find a way to put it back on the national 
agenda. And so I have introduced the Nationwide Gun Back Act of 2002.
  Mr. Speaker, hopefully this is the kind of gun safety legislation 
everyone can join in, whether pro or anti so-called gun control, 
because this is simply about how to help people voluntarily get illegal 
guns out of their own homes, and jurisdictions would, of course, 
participate only voluntarily.
  My bill would provide $100 million in Federal funds, a real pittance 
in our budget, to allow cities across the United States, small towns, 
counties, to do gun buy-backs of the kind that were done so 
successfully just a few years ago in the District of Columbia and in 
other parts of the country.
  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms would evaluate the 
proposals and distribute the funds. A jurisdiction would have to 
certify that it was capable of destroying the guns within 30 days of 
running an amnesty program, and of being fully capable of conducting 
such a buy-back program.
  Let me tell Members why I think all Members would want to be for 
this. There are throughout this Nation millions of people who know 
there are illegal guns in their homes who cannot come forward to get 
rid of them without implicating a relative. They fear if they came 
forward and said take this gun out of my house before some relative 
uses it on another relative, or somebody commits suicide, they cannot 
come forward without implicating a son, a daughter, a grandson, and so 
they sit there knowing that gun is in the house and unable to get rid 
of it.
  I want to say to those folks who want to get that gun out of the 
home, a gun illegally there, a gun for which there is no license, we 
will buy back the gun, usually for $50 or $100 to encourage people to 
come out.
  We did this in the District of Columbia; enormous success. Long 
lines. More than 6,000 firearms were turned in in three buy-backs. Not 
only did we do this in the District of Columbia, a number of other 
cities across the United States did the same thing. We did a kind of 
pilot program that showed that it could work. The notion that there 
would be hundreds of people standing in line waiting to give a gun to 
the cops is, I think, what all of America would like to see when it 
comes to gun safety for our children.
  It is children, as we see, who get hold of these guns, who want these 
guns, who use these guns because that is a child-like thing to do. We 
need to get these guns out of our homes. After using almost $400,000 in 
forfeiture money, some HUD money, we had to stop collecting the guns 
because we no longer had funds to buy back the guns, for goodness sake, 
on Mother's Day.
  If we want to do something to keep youngsters from getting hold of 
guns, going into the classroom and shooting at teachers and students, 
doing God knows what with guns, let us find a noncontroversial way of 
reducing gun violence. This, it seems to me, is just that way. It 
simply says wherever Members stand on guns, they are for guns being 
only in the hands of those people authorized to carry them. If a mother 
or father sees a gun brought into their home by a kid, allow that 
family member to get rid of that gun. This is the way that I would 
celebrate Mother's Day.

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