[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2571-S2572]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Gun Violence

  Mr. President, I rise today because tomorrow President Trump is going 
to become the first President in about 30 years to address the National 
Rifle Association. He will address the NRA tomorrow, and I thought it 
would be appropriate to come down to the floor to talk a little bit 
about the epidemic of gun violence in the context of this speech.
  A lot of us were thrown off by the tone of the President's inaugural 
address. It was very different from a lot of inaugurals we have heard--
not uplifting, really. There was much more of a dark, dystopian picture 
of America, one that was frankly unfamiliar to a lot of us. Maybe the 
most memorable line from the President's inaugural address was that 
after describing this dystopia that he believed most persons lived in, 
he said: ``This American carnage stops right here and it stops right 
now.''
  I wanted to come down to the floor today to talk about that idea of 
American carnage, what it really is. I mean, this is American carnage. 
It is 31,000 Americans, mostly young men and women, who die every year 
from gunshot wounds--2,600 a month, 86 a day. That is an enormous 
number. There is no other country in the first world, in the 
industrialized world, that has numbers like this. They happen for a 
variety of reasons. Two-thirds of those are suicides. That is an 
epidemic in and of itself. A lot of them are homicides. A number are 
accidental shootings. But America has this problem uniquely. There is 
no other industrialized competitor where this happens. That is the face 
of American carnage.
  President Trump is going to address the National Rifle Association 
tomorrow--an organization that is, frankly, dedicated to continuing 
this real carnage that is happening in America. You can't explain these 
numbers through mental illness. There is just as much mental illness in 
all of our economic competitors around the world. You can't explain 
this through exposure to violent content on TV or movies or video 
games. There are plenty other countries that have rates that are much 
lower than this and the kids see that same content. You can't explain 
this away by law enforcement. We spend an awful lot of money putting 
cops on the streets. What we have in this country that is different 
from any other nation is loose and lax gun laws that allow for 
criminals and people with serious mental illness to get their hands on 
weapons that are more powerful than those that are available in other 
nations. That was the case in Sandy Hook, too--enormous destruction in 
a short amount of time.
  I want to talk a little bit today about two things--first, about the 
real scope of this carnage, and second, about the real story of gun 
owners.
  The President is going to go talk to the NRA--a group that is 
increasingly wildly out of step with gun owners not just in my State 
but across the country.
  First, I want to talk about this idea of carnage in America--the 
central focus of the President's inaugural address. I commend to my 
colleagues an article that appeared earlier this week--maybe late last 
week--called ``What Bullets Do to Bodies.''
  We don't like to talk about that a lot because today the popular 
image of a gun is almost divorced from its actual function. People 
collect them. People buy them in order to convey a certain image or 
lifestyle. People certainly have weapons to protect themselves, but 
very few Americans actually understand what these guns are designed to 
do. They are designed to kill people. They are designed to gravely hurt 
people. In particular, the AR-15 and AR-15 variants are dedicated to 
killing people as fast and as gruesomely as possible.
  This article, ``What Bullets Do to Bodies,'' follows a trauma surgeon 
in Philadelphia. I want to read a few paragraphs from this article. It 
says:

       The main thing that people get wrong when they imagine 
     being shot is that they think the bullet itself is the 
     problem. The lump of metal lodged in the body. The action-
     movie hero is shot in the stomach; he limps to a safe house; 
     he takes off his shirt, removes the bullet with a tweezer, 
     and now he is better. This is not trauma surgery. Trauma 
     surgery is about fixing the damage the bullet causes as it 
     rips through muscle and vessel and organ and bone.
       The bullet can stay in the body just fine. But the bleeding 
     has to be contained, even if the patient is awake and 
     screaming because a tube has just been pushed into his chest 
     cavity through a deep incision without the aid of general 
     anesthesia (no time; the patient gets an injection of 
     lidocaine). And if the heart has stopped, it must be 
     restarted before the brain dies from a lack of oxygen.
       It is not a gentle process. Some of the surgeon's tools 
     look like things you'd buy at Home Depot. In especially 
     serious cases, 70 times just at Temple last year, the 
     surgeons will crack a chest right there in the trauma area. 
     The technical name is a thoracotomy. A patient comes in 
     unconscious, maybe in cardiac arrest, and Goldberg has to get 
     into the cavity to see what is going on. With a scalpel, she 
     makes an incision below the nipple and cuts 6 to 10 inches 
     down the torso, through the skin, through the layer of fatty 
     tissue, through the muscles. Into the opening she inserts a 
     rib-spreader, a large metal instrument with a hand crank. It 
     pulls open the ribs and locks them into place so the surgeons 
     can reach the inner organs. Every so often, she may have to 
     break the patient's sternum--a bilateral thoracotomy. This is 
     done with a tool called a Lebsche knife. It's a metal rod 
     with a sharp blade on the end that hooks under the 
     breastbone.

  The surgeon in this case is Dr. Goldberg.

       Goldberg takes out a silver hammer. It looks like--a 
     hammer. She hits the top of a Lebsche knife with the hammer 
     until it cuts through the sternum. ``You never forget that 
     sound,'' one of the Temple nurses told me. ``It's like a 
     tink, tink, tink. And it sounds like metal, but you know it's 
     bone. You know like when you see on television, when people 
     are working on the railroad, hammering the ties?''

  ``It's just the worst,'' one nurse told the writer of this story. 
``They're breaking bone. And everybody--every body--has its own kind of 
quality. And sometimes there's a big guy you'll hear, and it's the 
echo--the sound that comes out of the room. There's some times when it 
doesn't affect me, and there are some times when it makes my knees 
shake, when I know what's going on in there.''
  The article goes on to talk about what happens to those who survive.

       The price of survival is often lasting disability. Some 
     patients, often young guys, wind up carrying around colostomy 
     bags the rest of their lives.

  They go to the bathroom through a stoma, a hole in their abdomen.

       ``They're so angry,'' Goldberg said. ``They should be 
     angry.'' Some are paralyzed by bullets that sever the spinal 
     column. Some lose limbs entirely.

  AR-15s are designed by the military in order to kill people even more 
quickly so that you don't ever have the chance of going to an emergency 
room. That is what happened at Sandy Hook. What is remarkable is that 
not a single one of those kids ever made it to a trauma surgeon. All of 
those kids died on the spot--20 of them.
  You sort of have to think about bullets like running fingers through 
the water: When you run your fingers through the water, it causes 
ripples, it causes disruptions in the water around them. Well, a bullet 
coming out of an AR-15 rifle moves three times faster than a bullet 
coming out of a handgun. So just look what happens when you run your 
hand through water. You run it through at this speed versus running it 
through at that speed. The ripples and the disruptions get bigger, 
right? And they spread further. That is what happens when the bullet 
from an AR-15 enters the body of anyone, but it certainly does 
something different when it enters the body of a 6-year-old. One trauma 
surgeon said that when it hits bone, it likely will just turn it to 
dust. If a bullet from an AR-15 hits the liver, well, this surgeon says 
that ``the liver looks like a Jell-o mold has been dropped on the 
floor.''
  I know some people think AR-15s are fun. They are fun to show off to 
your friends. They are neat to fire. But that is carnage. A little 
kid's bones turning to dust in the middle of a first grade classroom is 
not sport; that is American carnage. Do you know what? A lot

[[Page S2572]]

of gun owners get this. A lot of gun owners understand that this has 
gotten out of hand.
  There was a poll that was conducted just about 2 weeks ago of gun 
owners across the country. Eighty percent of them support requiring a 
background check before you buy a gun. That is pretty similar to the 
number you would find when you ask gun owners and nongun owners, but 
the gun owners in my State were frankly just as shocked and horrified 
at what happened in that classroom at Sandy Hook as my nongun owners 
were.
  Gun owners in this country increasingly are not represented by the 
National Rifle Association, the group Donald Trump is going to go talk 
to this week, because the National Rifle Association, which claims to 
be speaking for gun owners, opposes background checks. They don't want 
a single additional gun sale to go through a background check. They are 
just fine with the fact that almost half of all guns sales in this 
country occur without a background check, meaning criminals and people 
with serious mental illness can get a gun so easily in this country 
that they don't even have to make much of an effort.
  Eighty-six percent of gun owners in this poll support prohibiting 
anyone who is convicted of stalking or domestic abuse from buying a 
gun. The NRA opposes that. Eighty-five percent of gun owners support 
prohibiting those who are on the Federal terror watch list or no fly 
list from buying a gun. The NRA opposes that.
  Eighty-eight percent of gun owners believe you should have a permit 
to carry a concealed handgun in a public place. The NRA opposes that. 
So it is no secret that 67 percent of gun owners feel the NRA used to 
be an organization dedicated to gun safety, but it has been overtaken 
by lobbyists. Fifty percent of gun owners feel the NRA does not 
represent their interests.
  When President Trump goes to talk to the NRA tomorrow, I hope he 
understands they are not advocating for the views of gun owners in my 
State, they are not advocating for the gun owners in most all of your 
States. They are a radical political organization. They have to start 
answering for why they don't square with the views of gun owners.
  Finally, here is a story of American carnage. Keon Huff, Jr., was 15 
years old when he was shot on March 17 of this year in Hartford, CT. 
Here is what Keon said to one of his mentors in the North End of 
Hartford. He said: ``I'm either going to go on to college and play 
basketball or I'm going to die on the streets.''
  Can you imagine there are kids who think that in this country? Can 
you imagine there are kids in this country who think their choices are 
to go play basketball in college or die on the streets of Connecticut? 
Most Americans cannot imagine a little kid saying that, but Keon 
thought that. He was right--because he was a great basketball player. 
He lived at the North End YMCA. He devoted all of his energy to 
basketball. He wanted to be the next Michael Jordan. If you told him 
otherwise, he just did not want to hear it. He was committed to playing 
basketball in college, but it was the other one that got him. He died 
in the hallway of his apartment complex when he was shot in the head on 
Friday, March 17. He died on the streets of Hartford. He did not end up 
going to college to play basketball. He is just one of 2,600 a month 
who die from guns, 31,000 a year, 86 a day.
  A lot of gun owners in this country get that. They understand the 
flow of illegal weapons into our streets. They understand there are 
some weapons out there that are way too powerful that do those terrible 
things to bodies when the bullet enters.
  When Donald Trump talks to the NRA, I hope he takes them on and asks 
why they refuse to stand up for policies that will end this American 
carnage that the President talked about in his speech and why they will 
not start actually representing the views of American gun owners.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). The Senator from Wyoming.