[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 30 (Thursday, February 15, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1136-S1138]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR THE VICTIMS OF THE FLORIDA SCHOOL SHOOTING

  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
observe a moment of silence for the victims of the school shooting in 
Florida.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senate will now observe a moment of silence for the victims of 
the Florida school shooting.
  (Moment of silence.)
  The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, those were all our children. Those of us 
who are parents, you can imagine the parents of those children 
wondering what else can be done because yesterday a former student at 
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Northern Broward County, 
Parkland, FL, walked onto the campus with a gas mask, smoke grenades, 
carrying an AR-15 assault rifle. He pulled a fire alarm, waited for 
students to come out into the hallway, and he opened fire. As a result, 
17 families are grieving. Their worst fears have become reality. More 
than a dozen other students who were injured are in the hospital, and 
some of them are in critical condition.
  At some point, we have to say enough is enough. At some point, we as 
a society have to come together and put a stop to this. This Senator 
grew up on a ranch. I have hunted all my life. I have had guns all my 
life. I still hunt with my son, but an AR-15 is not for hunting; it is 
for killing. Despite these horrific events that are occurring over and 
over, these tragedies have led so many of us to come to the floor and 
beg our colleagues to take commonsense actions that we all know will 
help protect our children and our fellow citizens from these kinds of 
tragedies, and we get nowhere.
  When is enough going to be enough? Sandy Hook Elementary, 20 students 
killed--that wasn't enough. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, 49 people 
killed by a terrorist--that wasn't enough. Las Vegas, 58 people 
killed--that wasn't enough. Just a year ago in the same county as the 
Parkland murders, Broward County's Fort Lauderdale airport, five people 
killed--that wasn't enough. Now this high school, 17 were killed. Some 
were as young as 14 years old.
  When is enough going to be enough? This Senator has spoken to local 
officials on the ground. I have spoken to the superintendent of the 
school, who, in his own way, is going through the grieving process; I 
have spoken to the FBI; and I have spoken to the sheriff's department 
to make sure they have everything they need. When we are finished with 
the Dreamer legislation today, I am headed there. When I go to the 
hospital and see the families and the hospital victims, all I can think 
is, How many more times are we going to have to go through this? And 
those families are going to ask me: When is enough enough?
  To those who say now is not the time to talk about gun violence 
because it is too soon, we don't want to politicize right after a 
tragedy--that is what is said over and over--I would ask: When is the 
time? If now is not the right time, when is the right time--after the 
next shooting or after the one that is going to come after that? 
Because these are not going to stop unless we change ourselves as a 
culture. How many more times do we have to do this? How many more folks 
have to die? When is enough going to be enough? Let's not hide from it. 
Let's have a conversation about this right now, not just about mental 
illness--that is part of it--and not just about protection in our 
schools, and that is part of it. Let's get to the root cause. Let's 
come together and help end this violence. Let's talk about that 19-
year-old carrying an AR-15. Let's do what needs to be done. Let's get 
these assault weapons off our streets. Let's accomplish something on 
background checks.
  My State passed a constitutional amendment--Florida, 1998--background 
checks have to be done in the purchase of a gun. It has never been 
implemented totally, and it has never been enforced--a simple 
background check. The terrorist who killed 49 people in Orlando at the 
Pulse Nightclub had been on the terrorist watch list. If we had a 
background check there--he wasn't on it, but maybe in a background 
check we ought to include those who have been on the terrorist watch 
list. Let's have a conversation about this.
  Do you remember a couple of years ago there was a proposal on the 
floor that if you are on the terrorist watch list, you can't buy a gun? 
That is pretty common sense. We will not let them get on an airplane 
because we don't want them taking down a commercial airliner, but they 
don't have a restriction on buying a gun.
  Let's get at the root cause of this issue. Let's do what we all know 
needs to be done. Let's do it now, not later. Let's not just talk about 
it, let's do something about it. Let's make what happened at Marjory 
Stoneman Douglas High School a pivotal moment in this country's 
history, not because it was one of the largest mass shootings but, 
hopefully, because it was the last.
  It is with a heavy heart I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Fischer). The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I join my colleague, the senior Senator 
from Florida, with a broken heart, as does most of the Nation due to 
the events of yesterday.
  There, indeed, was a time in the history of our country where after 
an event such as this there was a mourning period that followed with a 
policy debate, but today, that time is interrelated and intermixed. I 
don't blame it. I am not upset about it. In fact, I think there have 
been too many of

[[Page S1137]]

these events now. That is why we continue to face it.
  I think it is legitimate to say that even as we mourn, we have an 
obligation to ask ourselves, Is there something we could have done or 
should do to ensure that we don't see these things happening?
  It is cliche to say, but I think it is important to say: I am the 
father of two young ladies who happen to be in high school. I cannot 
imagine, but I can only envision, what it would be like if one day 
walking through the Capitol I get a text or one of those news alerts 
that says there has been a shooting in the high school they attend. I 
can only imagine how fearful it would be when suddenly those texts are 
not being answered, and those calls are not being returned. I thought 
about that last night and what it must feel like to be one of those 
parents at the hotel waiting for word because you hadn't heard from 
your children in hours or how painful it must have been for those whose 
job it was to go to these parents and inform them that their child's 
life--whom they had sent off to school in the morning, perhaps just 
weeks away from graduation--had ended senselessly in an event such as 
this. Because of what happened yesterday and because it is happening so 
often, people from across the political spectrum are arguing, there has 
to be something we can do; you have to be able to do something.
  I agree with that sentiment. I understand it. I would add, though, 
that if we do something, it should be something that works. The 
struggle up to this point has been that most of the proposals that have 
been offered would not have prevented not just yesterday's tragedy but 
any of those in recent history.
  I am going to say now what I am going to really emphasize at the end. 
Just because these proposals would not have prevented these events does 
not mean we raise our hands and say, therefore, there is nothing we can 
do. It is a tough issue. Part of the reason it is so hard to prevent 
these events is because if someone decides they are going to take it 
upon themselves to kill people, whether it is a political assassination 
of one person or the mass killing of many, if one person decides to do 
it, and they are committed to that task, it is a very difficult thing 
to stop. Again, that does not mean we should not try to prevent as many 
of them as we can.
  Perhaps the answer to how to prevent them begins by asking ourselves, 
What do these things have in common? They have two things in common. 
The first is that every single one of them was premeditated and 
planned. None of these shootings were an act of passion, where someone 
got up in the morning, was upset, and decided to do something out of 
rage. They all involved careful planning and premeditation. They 
deliberately took steps to get the guns, the weapons, the ammunition 
they needed. In many cases, they carefully studied the outline of the 
target they were going to go after. They specifically planned soft 
targets. There is evidence of that in this case. They planned to 
maximize the loss of life. They acquired the weapon they needed, and 
they used tactics they needed to kill as many people as they could.
  By the way, that premeditation and planning is one of the reasons why 
these laws that have been proposed wouldn't have prevented it. When 
someone is planning and premeditating an attack, they will figure out a 
way to evade those laws or, quite frankly, to comply with them in order 
to get around them.
  That may be an argument for new laws of a different kind, but it is 
what makes it hard, though not impossible.
  The second thing they have in common is, almost all of these attacks 
were preceded by clear signs of what was to come. A cursory review this 
morning of just a handful of the recent cases points that out.
  We are all familiar with the loss of life of over 20 people at a 
Texas church not long ago. This was a case of a killer whose wife had 
said he had tried to kill her. He was an individual who had been 
arrested and convicted for domestic violence, which had, unfortunately, 
never been reported to the background check system. He was an 
individual who had escaped a mental health facility, who had been 
caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base while on Active Duty, who 
had been discharged from the military for bad conduct, who had had 
social media posts that had bragged about buying dogs so as to shoot 
them, and who had actually expressed admiration for the South Carolina 
killer in that church killing a few years ago. He was an individual who 
had actually been charged with animal mistreatment just a few years 
earlier.
  At Sandy Hook, we know the killer had a spreadsheet with details of 
the previous school shootings. He was also an individual whose mental 
state had rapidly deteriorated to the point at which he had spoken to 
no one but his mother, whom he ultimately had killed before having 
carried out the horrific massacre. He had been someone who had been 
isolated in a room all day, who had largely played video games.
  The Pulse attack was precipitated and inspired by an adherence to the 
jihadist ideology. As Senator Nelson has already pointed out, this 
individual not once but twice had been on the FBI's radar screen and 
both times had been cleared. They had interviewed him, and they had 
asked him questions. He hadn't met the standard for staying on the 
list, and he had gone off.
  We are still learning facts about yesterday's killer. Unlike these 
others, we may learn more because he was apprehended alive. Authorities 
have had an opportunity to question him, and that will continue. Here 
is what we know:
  We know he was expelled from school for behavior the administrators 
often thought was dangerous. We know now from press accounts that both 
teachers and students did not act surprised that he was the assailant. 
In fact, many of them said there was a running joke--obviously not a 
joke anymore--that, one day, he would do something like this. We know 
the media and others have discovered social media posts that are, in 
hindsight, deeply disturbing, as they point to the glorification of gun 
violence and murder and even animal cruelty, apparently. We saw reports 
this morning of a post on YouTube a year ago on which he posted that he 
wanted to be a school shooter. The FBI was alerted to this and had 
followed up, by the way, in an interview with the person who had 
alerted them.
  They all have this premeditation in common, and we sit here in 
hindsight, in seeing all of these little points and say, taken 
together, those are warning signs. The problem is, they are not taken 
together because the people who might have known about his being 
expelled may not have known about the social media posts, and the 
people who knew about the social media posts may not have known what he 
wrote on YouTube, and the people who knew about the YouTube may not 
have known about the fact that the police had been called several times 
for different reasons and so forth--hence, the challenge in finding 
something that works.
  There are a lot of proposals, and I will share them because I have 
heard them before, and I hear them today. I am not diminishing them. I 
don't want this to be taken as ``because it will not work, I don't even 
want to hear your argument.'' I understand. I really do. You read in 
the newspaper that they used certain kinds of guns; therefore, let's 
make it harder to get those kinds of guns. I don't have some sort of de 
facto religious objection to that or some ideological commitment to 
that per se. There are all kinds of guns that are outlawed and weaponry 
that is outlawed and/or a special category. The problem is, we did that 
once, and it didn't work for a lot of reasons. One of them is that 
there are already millions of them on the streets, and those things 
last 100 years.
  You could pass a law that makes it hard to get this kind of gun in a 
new condition, but you are going to struggle to keep it out of the 
hands of someone who has decided that is what he wants to use because 
there are so many of them out there already that would be grandfathered 
in.
  You could do a background check. The truth is, in almost all of these 
cases I have cited, the individuals either erroneously passed 
background checks or would have passed them or did. Even if they 
couldn't pass the background checks, they could buy the guns the way 
MS-13 does and other gangs and other street elements do--from the black 
market.
  Again, it is not that we shouldn't have the background check. I am 
just

[[Page S1138]]

trying to be clear and honest here. If someone has decided ``I am going 
to commit this crime,'' he will find a way to get the gun to do it. 
That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a law that makes it harder. It 
just means, to be honest, that it is not going to stop this from 
happening. You could still pass the law per se, but you are still going 
to have these horrible attacks.
  That is why I do think that in some circles, it is not fair or right 
to create this impression that somehow this attack happened yesterday 
because there is some law out there that we could have passed to have 
prevented it. If there had been such a law that could have prevented 
what happened yesterday, I think a lot of people would have supported 
it, but I also want to be honest with the people who share my point of 
view on these issues.
  I think it is also wrong to say there is nothing we can do. I would 
admit that, perhaps, even I in the past, in the way I have addressed 
this issue or have spoken about it, may have come off as dismissive in 
the argument that since none of these laws would have worked, there is 
just nothing we can do, and we will just have to deal with it. Just 
because I don't have a quick or an easy answer for how to prevent these 
doesn't mean we don't have an obligation to try and find one, and by 
finding one, I don't mean a quick and easy answer. I mean an answer 
that would work.

  When I took office here, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the 
United States--every element of it. I didn't write the Constitution, 
but I agree with it, and I support it. The Second Amendment is in the 
Constitution, and you can debate what the outlines of the Second 
Amendment are or how far it goes, but it is in there, and I happen to 
support it. Oftentimes, I happen to point to the Second Amendment and 
say it is the Second Amendment that is right after free speech, which 
tells you how important it was to those who wrote those words. I still 
believe every bit of that.
  If it is fair to say the Second Amendment is so important--and I 
reiterate it because of how high up it is in the ranking from first to 
second, its being the second one--then I have to recognize there is a 
part of the Constitution that was written even before the Second 
Amendment. It is the preamble. That preamble lays out why we have a 
Constitution and, ultimately, why we have a government. In it, it reads 
that two of the reasons we have a government and, therefore, two of the 
reasons we have a Senate is to ensure domestic tranquility and to 
promote the general welfare.
  These school shootings and mass shootings and murders we are seeing 
now at an accelerated pace are, by definition, a threat to our domestic 
tranquility and a threat to our general welfare--the murder of children 
in schools, the murder of moviegoers, the murder of people at a church, 
the murder of people at a dance club on a Saturday night. These are all 
places at which we should be enjoying the general welfare and domestic 
tranquility.
  Even as we recognize that the Second Amendment gives Americans the 
right to bear arms and protect themselves--a right I strongly support 
and will continue to support--we must also recognize that same 
Constitution places upon this government an obligation to ensure 
domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare.
  We must confront the fact that, over the last 20 years, these attacks 
have accelerated. We must recognize the evidence that they are not 
isolated from one another and are building upon one another. We must 
recognize the scary reality that even as the Nation mourns and the 
parents grieve, there is a high probability, if not a certainty, that 
somewhere in America right now, some equally troubled, deranged, and 
violent individual is reading and watching coverage of this attack and 
gaining from it not sorrow but inspiration. Even as we speak here now, 
even as we stand here in mourning, and even as the days go by, there 
are probably some people out there who are going to try to do this 
because of what happened yesterday. That is a frightening thought, but 
it is a reality. It challenges us to find an answer to a very difficult 
issue of all of these bits and pieces of information out there.
  How do we in this society confront those who do things about which in 
another era we would just say, ``Well, they are just strange people. 
They are just weird. They are just going through a phase''?
  We cannot do it anymore. There is no longer such a thing as just 
innocent postings online that you just look at and say, ``Well, that is 
just them. They are just strange. They don't mean anything by it'' or 
``they are harmless.'' We cannot assume that anymore--none of us.
  How do we create a system in which all of these disconnected pieces 
and bits of data could somehow be tied together so whenever it was that 
this killer got ahold of these weapons and before conducting this 
attack, someone would say, ``Hold on a second. This person is the 
person who got expelled from school, who had these social media posts, 
who said he wanted to be a school shooter, who had his adopted mother 
pass away in November and who is now living, isolated, whose fellow 
students had all suspected him of being a person who could, one day, be 
violent''?
  How do you take these bits and pieces of information and turn them 
into a usable source of data that perhaps either prevents the 
acquisition of a weapon or, preferably, intervenes in that person's 
life before he carries this out? If anyone here tells you he has that 
one figured out, he is not being honest.
  This is hard, but we need to do it. We need to somehow figure it out 
because it goes to the very core of why we exist. There is no greater 
obligation of our government than to keep our people safe from threats, 
both foreign and domestic, and we must acknowledge that this is a 
threat. For whatever reason, we now live in a society in which someone, 
at 19 years of age, in the freest and the most prosperous Nation in all 
of human history, has decided to take it upon himself to take the lives 
of 17 individuals and severely injure 14 others--and to actually, 
probably, try to kill even more.
  What is happening in our country, in our culture, in our society?
  If there is something to be done with our laws, we should do that 
too. I am not saying don't focus on the gun part, but we also have to 
focus on the violence part, for to talk about gun violence requires you 
to talk about both, and the violence part is the one that goes well 
beyond an easy government solution and entails all kinds of different 
aspects of modern life that we are still grappling with.
  I hope we can start to figure it out. I haven't had the time, 
frankly, in less than 18 hours, to bring to the floor a proposal for 
how we will move forward or what the forum will be for this 
conversation to even begin. I know we can no longer just chalk it up to 
just isolated incidents because it has happened too often. Sadly, I 
believe it will happen again until we confront it and try to solve it. 
I hope we will, and I believe we can. I believe we must, for, as I said 
at the outset and will say in conclusion, it goes to the core of why we 
even exist to begin with--to keep our people safe no matter how new, 
how different, or how unique the threat may be.
  I yield the floor.

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