[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 54 (Thursday, April 3, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H2903-H2906]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       MONEY DOESN'T BUY RESPECT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I so much appreciate my friends, the 
Honorable Mr. Yoho, Mr. Perry, and Mr. King, discussing the issue that 
is very dear to my heart. And I appreciate my very dear friend, Mr. 
King, quoting me accurately, because you don't have to pay people to 
hate you. They will do it for free.
  We have spent billions and billions of dollars over the years paying 
people that have contempt for us. They don't like us. And from anybody 
that has ever tried to pay a bully their lunch money, they find they 
don't buy respect. They buy more contempt and more evil actions coming 
your way.
  So it just makes no sense, especially when money is fungible, and we 
continue to send money to the Palestinians. We continue to see 
outrageous examples in the Palestinian textbooks of just raw, unbridled 
hatred and demeaning of the Jewish people.
  And why should the textbooks among the Palestinians for their 
children be any different than what the adults are doing, when you find 
that Palestinian leaders are naming streets and holidays for people who 
have walked in and murdered groups of people with a bomb, children, 
innocent women, men, out with their families. They come in and kill 
them when they have done no harm, no wrong.
  We still hear people talking about Samaria and Judea, written in the 
Bible hundreds, maybe 1,600 years before the birth of Mohammed, about 
the areas that were the promised land for the children of Israel.
  So it becomes difficult for a people that didn't exist in 1000 B.C. 
to claim that someone who lived in that land, cultivated that land, had 
the prior claim to that land, somehow have a lesser right than people 
that came along hundreds and hundreds of years later.

[[Page H2904]]

  But America has a financial problem, and we shouldn't be just 
squandering money, paying people that hate us to educate their children 
to hate us, to educate the population to hate us, to teach songs that 
glorify hatred against Israel.
  As our dear friend Prime Minister Netanyahu has pointed out, Iran 
itself is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they 
certainly don't need those to deliver a nuclear weapon to Israel. Those 
are coming for the Great Satan. That would be us.
  So people wonder, well, what are we doing to protect ourselves?
  Back after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States of 
America's leaders pressured Ukraine to deliver nuclear weapons in their 
possession to Russia. Now, the Ukrainians have never really trusted the 
Russians. And, yes, the Russians have put people out of their homes in 
some areas, filled them with Russian people. There are areas that today 
feel like they are loyal to Russia because they are Russians. They sent 
them there. They displaced the Ukrainians.
  But the Ukrainians went ahead and turned over possession of nuclear 
weapons to Russians whom they distrusted because they trusted America. 
And the United States' leaders made sure they understood: we have got 
you covered. We will protect you. You don't have to worry. Go ahead and 
give nuclear weapons to Russia.
  Now the trust that the Ukrainian people put in the United States' 
leaders is coming back, potentially, to haunt them. That should never 
be the case. If we want to be taken seriously in the world, we can't be 
breaking promises to countries who rely on our integrity. We can't be 
doing that.
  So as people ask when we travel around the world in the past 6 months 
or so, they ask: What are you doing to prevent more terrorism when you 
won't even acknowledge the source of the terrorism? As one of the 
Egyptian leaders asked: Why are you not helping us in the war on 
terror? Now you are helping the people that supported the terror.
  They don't understand, and neither do I.
  I was asked today, Madam Speaker: What has the military done to avoid 
another Fort Hood incident since 2009? Madam Speaker, it appears the 
answer is quite embarrassing.
  What have we done to protect the country when this President has made 
our military so much smaller?
  What are we doing to protect the country when this President canceled 
agreements that had been made, promised, relied upon to other 
countries' detriment, missile defense? What are we doing to protect our 
country?
  This policy that this administration has had internationally to think 
that evil, hateful people will love us and want to be very good friends 
if we just downsize our military, we tie our own hands, we don't let 
our military really protect themselves adequately, that surely they 
will come to appreciate and like us and they won't consider us 
divisive, derisive, dismissive, well, that is not what they are 
thinking. This Nation has lost respect around the world, and it is 
heartbreaking.
  So they wonder, what are we doing to protect ourselves, because if we 
can't protect ourselves, how can we help stop evil people around the 
world?
  Some say, and I think there are people in this administration that 
think we need to follow the European example where we don't have to 
have much of a military at all and we just show, look, we want to get 
along and go along. The trouble with that idea is the Europeans have 
had the benefit of downsizing their military and having smaller 
militaries because they knew the United States existed and that we 
would not let an evil power take over Europe, Britain, that we would 
stop it because we would not want another Hitler to get as far as he 
did last time.
  We want to stop them before that happens because, assuredly, if 
Europe falls, England falls, they are coming for the United States. And 
now we know, because of radical Islam, they are more concerned about 
destroying America than they are even taking on Europe and England.
  So these are serious issues. So what have we done to protect the men 
and women in our military who are protecting us?
  It is heartbreaking. This administration, after 2009's horrendous 
accident--not accident--incident where a radical Islamist Muslim killed 
13 fellow military members. They were not allowed to have weapons on 
post. And we start digging and we find out, well, gee, when the 
Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, apparently, back in 
1992, there was a bill passed back around that time that prevented 
military members from carrying weapons on military installations.
  Mr. PERRY. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. PERRY. First I want to say thank you for your service as a Member 
of this body who has also served his Nation in uniform. Thank you, and 
how well you know and what you just spoke of.

                              {time}  1815

  I found it fascinating, on my most recent deployment to Iraq--it has 
been years now--we were mobilized to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I am sure you 
know it well. So you carry your weapon around with you 24 hours a day 
in your training because you must always be prepared, except--this is 
the fascinating part--except when you go to the PX, except when you go 
to the chow hall. Then you must find a place for your weapon. You must 
leave a soldier out in the parking lot to guard all the weapons, or 
what have you. And I am thinking to myself: Here I am, a commander of 
this task force. I have got men and women of all ages and all different 
backgrounds, and we are training and refining ourselves to go to war, 
to fight the enemy, to defend our Nation in arms, wearing your 
ballistic vest and all your gear, wearing a ballistic helmet so that if 
you do get shot, you are protected from that fire. But yet I am not 
trusted to carry my firearm on a military base.
  So what we have seen during this administration is this horrific 
incident, the previous one with Nidal Hasan, and nothing has really 
changed. And now we see a repeat of it. Meanwhile, soldiers--men and 
women who are willing and ready to serve their country--are left 
defenseless and can't even turn to their own Constitution, which they 
take an oath to uphold and defend to protect them.
  I find it the height of the dereliction of duty of this body and of 
this administration.
  Mr. GOHMERT. During the time that my friend was in the military, what 
weapons were you required to qualify using?
  Mr. PERRY. Well, as an officer, I qualified with a .9 millimeter, but 
of course everybody qualifies at some point M16, or an M4 now.
  Mr. GOHMERT. And that really is amazing about the military in a 
military installation because, like the gentleman said, when I was at 
Fort Benning, we had to qualify every year. And here at Fort Hood, one 
of the largest military installations anywhere, it adjoins Killeen, 
Texas. And many people--most people, I think, in Texas recall that 
there was a terrible shooting incident in a cafeteria in Killeen that 
adjoins Fort Hood where a man went in and started killing people in the 
cafeteria.
  And there was a woman there who had to put her gun in the glove 
compartment because we didn't have laws that allowed you to carry 
weapons around Texas. And she realized that she could have saved her 
parents from being murdered if she had been able to carry her concealed 
weapon. So she got elected to the State legislature. She is a hero. She 
got the concealed-carry bill through and signed into law. And that had 
been used in other States to get concealed-carry bills passed.
  So when people say, well, how horrible, there had been a prior mass 
shooting before. Actually, there had been two right there, just right 
so close together. Killeen, though, civilians, who are not required to 
qualify with weapons every year, like you and I have been in the 
military.
  Yet if, as someone trained with weapons, qualifying every year, you 
step one foot off that military installation, now you can start 
carrying a concealed weapon if you just got the permit. But if you step 
back on the military installation, where everyone is required to be 
qualified to use weapons, you can't have one.
  We are working on a bill which will not just create the power, but it 
will

[[Page H2905]]

require that military installations allow people there to go through 
and apply for and get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, just as 
they could in Fort Hood if they put one foot off post into Killeen. And 
they ought to be able to step back on the installation.
  Mr. PERRY. If the gentleman would yield, I am just curious--you have 
spent more time here than I have--what was the impetus for the current 
law which restricts DOD and commanders, as an installation commander 
myself, from exacting our own authority based on the Constitution?
  Mr. GOHMERT. And actually, that was back around the time I became a 
district judge in Texas. And I didn't learn until I was here in 
Congress just recently that they had ever passed such a law. There was 
a Democratic majority in the House, a Democratic majority in the 
Senate.
  I can't imagine why they were thinking they had to protect our 
military members from themselves when we give them far more lethal 
weapons--I mean, you give somebody an RPG.
  Mr. PERRY. Who is better trained than the United States military, the 
different branches serving on those bases and posts all around the 
country, all around the world, dealing with weapons on a daily basis, 
dealing with ammunition and its effects on a daily basis? Most of what 
you do revolves around ranges, firing, qualifications because we train. 
Readiness is important, and using the tools of the trade; whether you 
like it or not, they are weapons, because there are bad actors out 
there. And that is what they have to use to be able to fight back.
  So that is the one place, specifically the one place on the planet 
where you would think that people would be able to. As you said, they 
are trained, are prepared, are knowledgeable, are familiar, are 
comfortable with. And yet this United States Government does not allow 
them to defend themselves and, more importantly, the oath and the very 
Constitution, the set of rules with which we govern this Nation.
  When you raise your right hand and take that solemn oath, 
unfortunately under the current paradigm, under this current 
administration, when you take the oath to join the military, you are 
giving away the right to defend yourself while you are on a military 
base.
  Mr. GOHMERT. The gentleman makes so many good points. I would like to 
yield to the gentleman to answer a question.
  Having been a commander, we have talked about how military were 
qualified, were required to qualify to use weapons. But as a commander, 
do you know of any one civilian in the civilian world who has more 
training about not misplacing your weapon or setting your weapon down 
or leaving your weapon than somebody in the military? The gentleman 
knows what I talk about.
  Mr. PERRY. Certainly you and I can both attest to this. It is a 
sensitive, it is a controlled item. And from day one, you learn the 
very harsh reality that you do not ever, ever misplace your weapon. 
There are very serious penalties for misplacing your weapon. You learn 
to live with it, to sleep with it, to shower with it. It is you, and 
you are it. You are together at all times and all things. And 
accountability is paramount. That is what I mean. There can be no 
breach of this standard. And there is none. And the military trains you 
in that very acutely.
  So, once again, I would say, there is no place where individuals--men 
and women--are more familiar, better trained, and more well equipped to 
deal with firearms than in the military, especially--specifically on a 
military base.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I was talking with one of our Capitol Police yesterday 
after this shooting at Fort Hood, again. One of our great Capitol 
Police. We are so blessed with such great qualified protectors of the 
Capitol area. And he was in the military for 13 years and left the 
military and became a Capitol policeman. Well, I trust that gentleman 
now to have a weapon at all times. I am delighted if he will carry a 
weapon at all times.

  But Washington, D.C., has these really well-intentioned laws. Let's 
eliminate weapons in Washington, D.C. They have been struck down by the 
Supreme Court because they are unconstitutional. But I want somebody 
like that, that I could trust, whether he was still in the military, as 
he was, or as a Capitol policeman. I am very comfortable with him 
carrying a weapon and feel better knowing that there were people like 
him around carrying weapons.
  So when that question was asked, what has the military done since 
2009's Fort Hood mass shooting to prevent this kind of thing from 
happening, I know that the military cannot do any more than the 
Commander in Chief orders them to do. I don't know of anything that the 
Commander in Chief has done, as the commander, where the buck stops, to 
provide more protection from an incident like as now happened again.
  If the gentleman knows of anything that has been done.
  Mr. PERRY. I do not. And I thank you for asking. But just thinking 
about it, the process by which a person joins and maintains the 
attendance, so to speak, in the military requires an investigation of 
your person, of your background, who you are, your capabilities, and so 
on and so forth. And for an administration, rightly so, very concerned 
about background checks and making sure that only those in our free 
country avail themselves of their Second Amendment right and not those 
who shouldn't, such as criminals, who would also not be allowed to 
either join the military or stay in the military, once again, I would 
say, there is no safer, no better a place than on a military base 
because all those folks have been vetted, have been checked, do carry a 
weapon.
  So I find it interesting that maybe the military, maybe DOD has made 
a recommendation to the administration and said, part of the solution 
to Nidal Hasan and his heinous acts are to make sure that people can 
defend themselves, soldiers, servicemembers at different bases and 
different branches of the services can protect themselves under force 
of arms, if necessary, on base. But that has yet to be found out.
  But it would be very interesting to know if DOD did make that 
recommendation and nothing was done about it, and nothing was done 
about it. If there was no cry from the administration to say, hey, 
Congress, this is a problem. Here is part of the solution set. Get to 
work.
  As you said, we have already gotten to work on that here. But I 
suspect that that bill--well-intentioned, the right thing to do--will 
make it out of the House in due course but under this Senate and under 
this administration will languish. That is what my suspicion will be.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I would think, though, that at this point in time, 
with so many Senators of the Democrat persuasion being concerned about 
elections and the disaster ObamaCare has been, if we pass a bill that 
provides for military installations to allow permits to be applied for 
and obtained for a concealed-carry on a military installation, that the 
Senate will be in a difficult position if they don't take it up. And 
the President would hurt his party dramatically if it passed out of the 
Senate as well and he refused to sign it.
  There will be other incidents like Fort Hood again. It appears that 
we have not been adequately addressing post-traumatic stress disorder. 
And you never know if someone is going to go off, like we see with 
Washington, D.C., having such a high murder rate. Just like the old 
bumper stickers have said in the past, When guns are outlawed, only 
outlaws have guns. That is exactly what has happened at Fort Hood both 
times. It is what happened in Killeen with the mass shooting in the 
cafeteria. And the problem is not honest, honorable, law-abiding 
Americans having a gun under their Second Amendment rights; it is the 
outlaws having guns.
  There were thousands of cases that came through my court as a 
district judge, felonies--all of them felonies. And I couldn't remember 
any cases involving guns where the guns were lawfully acquired. The 
criminals get guns, and they don't care. The name ``criminal'' comes 
from the fact that they commit crimes, and they don't care what the law 
is. They break the law. So the people that are disarmed are those law-
abiding citizens.
  I really think we cannot stand another 5 years of calling such a 
terrible disaster just ``workplace violence'' when it is a tragedy that 
can be prevented, can be stopped. And since the

[[Page H2906]]

Commander in Chief has not taken action that would impede it or stop 
it, we need to do that.
  And we need to reverse the law that was passed by the Democratic 
House and Democratic-controlled Senate back in the early nineties and 
get a bill to the President's desk. And if the Democrats--at least some 
of them in the Senate--are not willing to pass such a law or Harry Reid 
is not willing to bring that to the floor, the answer is very simple: 
We vote in Republican Senators so that they will bring it to the floor. 
And next January, then we can present it to the President.

                              {time}  1830

  And then if he does not and is not willing to sign it at that point, 
then we will either have enough to override the veto or we will have a 
President from a different party come November of 2016 who will allow 
the military to protect themselves instead of condemning them to 
helplessly watch while they and their friends are gunned down by an 
outlaw.
  I yield to my friend.
  Mr. PERRY. I agree with you on your assessment. I hope you are right 
about that. I hope you are right, that we accomplish something. It 
would be great if it wasn't partisan, if we could just do the right 
thing and allow people who have agreed to serve and take the oath to 
uphold and defend the Constitution to then have the same protections of 
that Constitution availed to themselves. And that would be, in my 
opinion, the right thing to do regardless--regardless--of your party.
  So I would hope that we would see that now, see that as a solution 
set to--look, on this current case, it appears that when confronted 
with a firearm, this individual who carried out this most recent crime 
and these atrocities at Fort Hood, when confronted with a firearm 
himself, that is when the carnage ended.
  So it seems to me that maybe it won't stop it, but it certainly can 
mitigate it, and maybe if these folks in the future that would ponder 
such an act, if they knew that other members on post would be carrying, 
as well, they might be reluctant to do the same thing.
  Mr. GOHMERT. In the 1 minute we have got left, I just want to thank 
my friend from Pennsylvania for all of his service to our country in 
the military and here in Congress. I hope that we are able to get a 
bill passed through the House, through the Senate, and to the 
President's desk.
  Let me just finish by saying there was an atrocity here on Capitol 
Hill yesterday with the testimony of the former Acting Director of the 
CIA. Our military has become an international--it is tragic, but a 
laughing--
  If they are not defending themselves, then how can we count on them 
to defend us? And after the testimony under penalty of perjury 
yesterday by a former acting director of the CIA, it has told the world 
that the only place there has been worse intelligence than we have had, 
particularly during Benghazi, would have been back at Little Big Horn 
by General Custer.
  We have got to turn this place around so that Americans can protect 
Americans and Americans serving our military can protect themselves and 
our intelligence does start living up to the name instead of making it 
such a tragedy.
  With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________