[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 40 (Wednesday, March 7, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H1469-H1472]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.


                             General Leave

  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may 
have 5 days to revise and extend their remarks and to include 
extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Maryland?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I want to thank the 
distinguished Congresswoman from New York for her comments about 
Francis Bellamy, the great Christian abolitionist and socialist who 
authored America's Pledge of Allegiance. He was a great patriot who 
wanted to unify the country in the wake of the Civil War during the 
Reconstruction Period. We, indeed, owe him a great debt of gratitude 
for everything he did for America.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about a matter of pressing importance and 
urgency to the people of America today. It is the question of gun 
violence and what Congress is doing about the problem of gun violence.
  I want to start by invoking something that all of the schoolchildren 
of America know about, which is the idea of a social contract.
  You can go back and read John Locke or Thomas Hobbes, or Rousseau, 
but all of them began with the idea that, in the state of nature, we 
are all in a dangerous and perilous condition because there is no law. 
It is the rule of the jungle. Hobbes said that the state of nature was 
a condition that was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Because 
of that, people enter into civil society to create a government.
  The first principle of government is that we have got to protect our 
people. As Cicero put it, the safety and good of the people must be the 
highest law. That is why we have a social contract.
  But, Mr. Speaker, in America today, our social contract is bruised 
and battered and damaged and tenuous because of the gun violence which 
has come to our public schools, to our universities, to our churches, 
to our movie theaters, to the public square.
  America's high school students have woken us up to the fact that this 
is not a normal condition. America is an absolute outlier nation in 
terms of the levels of gun violence that we permit to take place in our 
own society. Our social contract is threatened by the gun violence that 
is a menace to every single American citizen.
  Now, we have a social contract, we have got a social covenant, and it 
is the Constitution of the United States. We know that we have an 
amendment in there which deals specifically with the question of guns, 
the Second Amendment, which says: ``A well regulated Militia, being 
necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to 
keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.''
  That is the Second Amendment.

                              {time}  1700

  Now, some people would have us believe that, because of the Second 
Amendment, there is nothing that we can do about the problem of gun 
violence. If you remember nothing else about what I am about to say, 
please remember this: this is demonstrably, absolutely, categorically 
false, and we know it is false because the Supreme Court has told us 
that it is false.
  In its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme 
Court adopted the individual rights view of the Second Amendment. There 
was a contest between those who said, no, you only have a right to bear 
arms in connection with militia service versus those who said that it 
is an individual right. The individual right won in a 5-4 decision.
  But in the course of making that 5-4 decision, the majority on the 
Supreme Court agreed, readily, that the right to bear arms is one that 
can be conditioned on all kinds of regulation by the government. That 
is true of all of the rights in the Bill of Rights.
  Think about the First Amendment, which guarantees all of us the right 
to speak. You have a right to go protest across the street from the 
White House, but do you have the right to go protest across the street 
from the White House at 2 in the morning with 20,000 people without 
getting a permit? Of course, you do not.
  The Supreme Court has said that the exercise of First Amendment 
rights is conditioned by reasonable time, place, and manner 
restrictions. And in the same sense, the Second Amendment right to keep 
and to bear arms is conditioned on reasonable time, place, manner, and 
use restrictions by the government. We know that to be the case. The 
Supreme Court told us that in Heller.
  In Heller, the Court said everybody has a right to the possession of 
a handgun for purposes of self-defense; everybody's got a right to a 
rifle for purposes of hunting and recreation. But nobody's got a right 
to possess a machine gun, even though someone might describe it as an 
arm; nobody's got a right to possess a sawed-off shotgun, much less 
does anybody have a right to access a weapon without going through a 
background check, without going through the government's policy for 
determining that you are not going to be a danger to yourself or to 
other people. The Supreme Court was very clear about that.
  Those people who were out there saying, ``We can't allow any gun 
safety regulation or we are going to lose the right to have guns, our 
guns are going to be taken away,'' are engaging in a knowing falsehood. 
There is no way that the guns of the people of America--the hundreds of 
millions of guns that are out there--could be confiscated. They can't 
be confiscated.
  People have a right to them for purposes of self-defense and for 
purposes of hunting and recreation, but it doesn't give you a right to 
an AR-15. It doesn't give you a right to carry weapons of war into 
public schools and into movie theaters and into public places, and it 
does not give you the right to access guns without a background check, 
yet that is precisely what the law is today. We have a huge gaping 
loophole where terrorists can go to a gun show and simply buy a gun 
without any background check at all.
  Now, here is the good news that people want to keep from you. We have 
great news, America. Mr. Speaker, we know there is good news, and here 
is the good news.
  We have a consensus about what to do in America, starting with a 
universal criminal and mental background check, supported by, no 
longer, 95 percent of the American people. In the wake of the Parkland 
massacre, it is 97 percent of the people who think that you should not 
be able to access a weapon without first passing a background check.
  That is the vast majority of the people, maybe almost a unanimous 
verdict by the American people. Almost everybody believes that we need 
to close the gun show loophole, we need to close the internet gun sale 
loophole, we need to close the 7-Eleven parking lot loophole, and we 
need to close the loophole that would allow criminals and gangsters and 
terrorists to go to a gun show and purchase a gun. Ninety-seven percent 
of the American people agree with that.
  Sixty-seven percent of the American people agree with the call of the 
young people who survived the massacre in Parkland, which took the 
lives of 17 students and teachers, the call for a ban on assault 
weapons. Sixty-seven percent of the American people, more than two-
thirds of the American people, agree with a ban on the sale of 
military-style assault weapons.
  And 75 percent of the American people say that Congress must be 
acting to reduce gun violence. So we have a consensus over what to do.
  But what is happening now?
  Well, I serve on the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker, and we 
had a vote today that had nothing to do with guns. It was about 
collecting data on

[[Page H1470]]

bail policies, which is not to say that that is unimportant; but, 
seriously, millions of people in America are demanding action from 
Congress, and we can't even have a hearing on the problem of people 
accessing assault weapons and going to public schools and assassinating 
our school children at pointblank range.
  Now, I had the good fortune of meeting some of the young people from 
Parkland who have awoken the conscience of the country. One of them was 
asked a question: Why, suddenly, is America waking up in the wake of 
the Parkland massacre, which took the lives of 17 people, but it didn't 
in the same way after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, at Sandy 
Hook, which took the lives of even more people, 26 people?
  She had a fascinating answer. She said: Most of the people killed at 
Sandy Hook were first graders, and first graders can't start a 
revolution against the political power of the NRA; but high school 
students know how to do it because they understand how to contact 
people, and they know social media. They know Facebook and Twitter, and 
they have enough education so that they can speak with authority about 
the recklessness and the negligence of government not addressing the 
problem.
  Congress now is the outlier. Congress will not act.
  Are we a failed state such that when more than 95 percent of the 
American people agree that something needs to be done, Congress cannot 
act?

  Are we abandoning our social contract?
  Are we abandoning our primary commitment to defend the lives of our 
own people?
  Well, it is a very serious moment. We are having our Special Order 
hour on the problem of gun violence, the failure of Congress to act, 
but the need for Congress to act.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to my distinguished colleague from the State of 
Washington (Ms. Jayapal), with whom I serve on the House Judiciary 
Committee.
  Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Raskin for his 
leadership on the Progressive Caucus and for his leadership on the 
Judiciary Committee. Nobody understands the Constitution better than a 
constitutional law professor.
  I appreciate you bringing the reality of the situation to us. Nobody 
is talking about trying to take guns away from everybody. We are 
talking about making sure that we have safety with anybody who owns a 
gun and that we have the ability to check any of the dangerous contexts 
for which guns can be used. We have a responsibility, really, to 
protect our country, to protect our young people, and to do something 
for all of the families that have been affected by gun violence.
  In addition to all of the things that he mentioned, we need to 
consider gun violence as a public health crisis. That is what it is. 
And when we look around at the millions of people who are dying from 
gun violence, you think about this, and you think about the way in 
which we treated vehicle fatalities as a public health crisis and we 
instituted laws around seatbelts, and the way we thought about smoking 
as a public health crisis and we instituted laws around smoking. But, 
in order to do that, we had to first do research into those areas and 
figure out what were the best ways for us to move forward as a country 
in preventing those kinds of fatalities that are preventable.
  Unfortunately, what happened in this country is that Congressman 
Dickey, some time ago, passed an amendment called the Dickey amendment. 
While it didn't explicitly prohibit research into gun violence, it all 
but did that.
  There have now been many, many calls to repeal the Dickey amendment. 
Interestingly, Congressman Dickey passed away last year, last April. 
Before he died, in 2012, he actually came out on the record and said 
that he wished he hadn't been so reactionary, that he wished he hadn't 
passed that amendment, because he realized that it did lead to a 
chilling effect on research into gun safety. The way that it did that 
is, when they passed the amendment, it essentially said that no Federal 
funds should be used for advocacy, but, at the same time, the amount of 
funds that were used for research were cut by exactly that amount.
  So this is not about advocacy; this is about how do we protect our 
country, how do we treat this as what it is: a public health crisis.
  Mr. Speaker, I am here to say that I am really proud of my home State 
of Washington. Just yesterday, we became the latest State to ban bump 
stocks. And we also had a senate committee pass a bill to mandate that 
people purchasing rifles go through the same background checks required 
for pistol purchases and that we increase the legal age to buy rifles 
to 21.
  So, in less than a month, my home State has finally advanced 
meaningful proposals to prevent gun violence. I wish I could say that 
we were doing that here in Congress. I truly believe that there are 
Members on both sides of the aisle who would like to pass sensible gun 
safety regulations and legislation.
  Unfortunately, I feel like we are being held hostage not by the 
reasons that we all came to Congress to get sensible things done that 
protect our constituencies, but by lobbying interests in the National 
Rifle Association; and every time there is a small movement towards 
progress, somehow they come in and, essentially, squash those efforts.
  In October of last year, Congress stood by after 58 people were 
killed and over 500 injured at a music festival in Las Vegas. One of my 
constituent's, Zach Elmore, sister was shot. Luckily, she was one of 
the lucky ones who survived the shooting.
  I read a letter on the floor that Zach had read to me--it was an 
incredibly moving letter--about his deep anger and frustration at 
Congress for not protecting his sister and millions like her, those who 
were not as lucky as she was.
  In November, Congress failed to act, after 26 people were killed and 
20 injured at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas; and then a few 
weeks ago, on Valentine's Day, as we all know, 14 students and 3 
teachers were killed, and 15 injured, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High 
School in Florida.
  Already, in 2018 alone, there have been 2,581 deaths because of gun 
violence, including those precious lives that were lost at Parkland; 
105 of those deaths were children ages 11 and under.
  Let me just say that one more time: 105 of the 2,581 deaths, this 
year alone, were children ages 11 and under.
  As Members of Congress, we need to make sure our kids are safe.
  I am so grateful to the energy and the commitment and the passion and 
the smarts and the organizing strength of the Parkland students, 
because, as you say, they were not first graders who couldn't organize 
for themselves. They are students who are soon going to be voters. And 
they understand that they can't vote right now, but they also 
understand that they do have a voice, their parents' vote, and they can 
make sure that people across the country understand that we have a 
responsibility to them, to our children, to the people across the 
country who are afraid of sending their kids to school.
  That should be our number one priority is keeping our kids safe. Our 
kids should be able to walk into schools knowing that they can fully 
focus on learning. Our parents shouldn't have to wonder whether their 
kids will come home from school.
  My heart goes out to the families that lost someone in the Parkland 
shooting and all of the shootings across the country. I am proud to 
stand alongside incredible young people who wasted no time to demand 
action and justice for their friends and teachers. They are determined, 
they are brave, they are unafraid, and they are depending on us to pass 
meaningful legislation to end gun violence.
  One of the interesting things that I heard them say when I met with 
them is: We are not looking for the whole package. We just want to see 
steps along the way that show us that it is possible for us, on a 
bipartisan basis, to make some progress on this critical issue, to make 
sure that no child, no parent, no community, ever again, has to 
experience the unspeakable tragedy of another school shooting.
  I am tired of seeing men, women, and children die because the gun 
lobby puts profit over people. That is not, as Mr. Raskin so eloquently 
said, what our Founders intended by the right to bear arms. Support for 
stricter measures to prevent gun violence is at an all-time

[[Page H1471]]

high, on a bipartisan basis. Eighty-seven percent of gun owners and 74 
percent of NRA members support commonsense solutions like criminal 
background checks.
  I have a plea for gun owners across the country. My husband used to 
be a hunter. We had guns at home. And I understand the need for people 
to have guns for recreational purposes, to ensure their own safety. But 
this is not about that. It is not about taking guns away from people, 
who legitimately exercise responsible behavior. It is about making sure 
that we have the protections in place so that no more children, no more 
people die.

                              {time}  1715

  So here is my plea for gun owners: urge the NRA to represent your 
views, show them that you mean business, maybe even consider 
terminating your NRA membership if the organization continues to 
advocate against these kinds of sensible gun reforms.
  Here in Congress, I hope that we act now. I really truly believe--and 
I have talked to some of my Republican colleagues who also want to do 
something about this. They don't want to be hamstrung. They want to 
move legislation forward, but not by attaching legislation that 
actually loosens gun restrictions into legislation that helps us.
  We need just one or two pieces of commonsense gun reform legislation 
so that we can show these young people that we are responding to their 
pleas: no more shootings in schools, no more shootings in places of 
worship, no more shootings in our streets, no more mass shootings, 
period.
  Let's show these students and students at schools across the country 
that we are not afraid to protect them. Let's show them that we can 
choose our country over the gun lobby. Let's stand with our kids. Let's 
pass commonsense gun violence prevention legislation.
  Mr. Speaker, I join Mr. Raskin in hoping that in the Judiciary 
Committee, which is the committee of record for this issue, that we can 
at least have some hearings on this.
  What is so problematic about having a hearing on public health 
research into gun violence? What is so problematic about having a 
hearing on multiple pieces of legislation that have bipartisan support? 
Isn't that what we are supposed to do? I know that is why I came here.
  I am a first term Member, and I know our speaker is as well, and I 
believe that we have much more in common than we do that divides us.
  We don't have to necessarily tackle every piece of this, but let's 
make some substantial progress forward together, and let's show our 
students that we will protect them.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman again for his leadership.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we are so grateful for Congresswoman Pramila 
Jayapal from Washington, for her powerful leadership and her lucid 
discussion today of the gun violence problem.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for placing emphasis on the fact 
that we have had no hearings in our Congress since we arrived here more 
than a year ago on the problem of gun violence in the House Judiciary 
Committee.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for placing emphasis on the 
Dickey amendment, which forbids the expenditure of any public money 
even to research the epidemiology of gun violence and gun violence 
epidemics in the way that certain outbreaks of gun violence and mass 
shootings will trigger others.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman also for placing emphasis on the 
fact that the Newtown families who come to lobby in Washington, the 
families from Parkland, just want to see us break the logjam; they just 
want to see us end the paralysis and do something. And why not start 
with the thing that is backed by more than 9 out of 10 Americans, a 
universal criminal and mental background check so that people who are 
carrying guns in America are the lawful gun owners who can do it 
responsibly? That is something that the overwhelming majority of 
American people believe in, yet this Congress seems to be completely 
stuck, totally hamstrung.
  Mr. Speaker, please help us dislodge this legislation.
  Now, Congresswoman Jayapal praised her home State of Washington, 
rightfully, for the actions they have taken recently to ban the bump 
stocks and to pass other commonsense gun safety reforms.
  I would like to talk about what has happened in my home State, the 
great State of Maryland, which is touching Washington, D.C., where we 
all are right now.
  In 2013, after the catastrophe took place in Newtown, Connecticut, at 
Sandy Hook, where an AR-15 was used to assassinate 26 people at 
pointblank range, we acted in Maryland. We passed a ban on the sale of 
military-style assault weapons. We passed a ban on high-capacity 
magazines.
  We gave our State police the right to engage in frequent and 
unannounced inspections of the gun dealers so that bad apple gun 
dealers couldn't be dealing firearms directly into the underground.
  Then we said if a firearm is lost or stolen, it has got to be 
reported within 48 hours, and if not, that is a misdemeanor, because 
what was happening was they were selling guns to criminals, they would 
surface in a homicide investigation 10 months later, we would trace it 
back to the gun dealers, and the dealers would say: Oh, yeah. That was 
stolen. We forgot to report it.
  Or they would say: We lost that, but, yeah, we never filed a report.
  So now, in our State, you have got to file a report--commonsense gun 
safety supported by people across the spectrum--so we don't have a 
leaky system where guns are getting into the wrong hands.
  Now, our opponents on this, of course, marched and protested and said 
they were opposed to all of it. They said this was an attempt to 
confiscate everybody's guns, which, of course, it was not. And 
responsible law-abiding gun owners have all the guns that they had 
before, they have still got them, but it was challenged in court. They 
said it violated the Second Amendment.
  I raise it because I want America to notice this. They sued in the 
United States District Court in Maryland, and they lost. And the court 
said, reading the District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008, that 
the Second Amendment permits reasonable gun safety regulation that does 
not infringe on the fundamental right to bear arms for self-defense or 
to have rifles for hunting or recreation, but there is no right for 
civilians to be carrying military-style hardware and weaponry in 
public.
  They appealed it to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fourth 
Circuit affirmed the ruling of the district court.

  Then they brought it to the United States Supreme Court, and the 
Supreme Court let that ruling stand.
  So there is a perfect example of how you can enact reasonable gun 
safety regulation and it doesn't infringe anybody's Second Amendment 
rights and it doesn't impinge on the right of reasonable, law-abiding 
gun owners to have guns for lawful purposes.
  So why are we involved in this terrible, atrocious situation where we 
have rates of death and fatality and injury greater than six times 
higher than any other modern industrialized country on Earth?
  In the U.K., it is less than 50 people a year who die by gun; in 
Japan, it is less than 50 or 60 people a year. We are losing tens of 
thousands of Americans every year.
  Is it because we have mental illness and they don't? No. They have 
got mental illness, too. Is it because Americans are more violent than 
other people? I don't think so.
  It is simply because of the ready access to firearms wherever you go, 
and anybody can get them almost anywhere. Okay? So we need to follow 
the rest of the world in terms of enacting reasonable gun safety 
legislation.
  Now, we have got our Second Amendment, so nobody's handguns are going 
to get taken away. The Supreme Court said it in the Heller decision and 
reaffirmed that 2 years later, that it applies not just in the District 
of Columbia directly against Congress, but it applies in the States, in 
a case that came out of Chicago.
  So we know that nobody's handguns are going to be taken away and 
nobody's rifles are going to be taken away.
  All we are talking about is keeping our children and our 
grandchildren

[[Page H1472]]

safe; keeping people safe at concerts, like in Las Vegas; keeping 
people safe in church, like in South Carolina; keeping people safe in 
their public schools, like in Parkland, Florida; keeping college 
students safe, like at Virginia Tech. That is what we are talking about 
doing.
  Now, we don't know why Congress won't act. Some people are starting 
to hypothesize that America has become a failed state, that we can't 
respond to an almost unanimous demand by our own people to legislate in 
the interests of public safety, which is the most elementary 
requirement of a civilized society under a social contract.
  Some people say we have become a failed state, like failed states we 
see around the world. You know that authoritarianism is on the march 
all over the world, whether it is in Putin's Russia or Duterte's 
Philippines or Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey, where it is all 
about enriching the people in power--ignoring the needs of the people, 
ignoring the rights of the people, but instead, using government as a 
money-making operation for a tiny group of people.
  Have we become a failed state? Is that what we are? I don't think we 
are a failed state.
  We have had other periods in American history where Congress has 
refused to deal with pressing public policy problems. One of the most 
famous ones, beginning in the 1830s, was when a proslavery faction 
within Congress said it would refuse to have any hearings at all and 
would refuse to entertain any petitions against slavery from anywhere 
in the country. It was a direct assault on the right to petition 
Congress for redress of grievances, it was a direct assault on the 
freedom of speech, but they imposed this stranglehold on Congress so 
there could be no debate on the most pressing issue of the day.
  Now, I am not likening slavery to gun violence. Okay? I want to be 
clear about that. But I am saying that there are other times in 
American history where Congress has acted as a chokehold against the 
ventilation of serious public concerns and grievances. There have been 
times when Congress has refused to engage in debate, discussion, and 
analysis of the most pressing problems of the day, and that is where we 
are right now on gun violence.
  All we are saying, Mr. Speaker, to the majority in Congress, is let's 
have some hearings on this, let's have some hearings on a universal 
criminal and mental background check being demanded by nearly every 
American right now. Let's start with that. Is that one thing we can all 
agree on, that there should be a background check before people go out 
and obtain weapons of war that they then carry into the hallways and 
the schoolrooms of our country? Can we have a hearing on that?
  If you don't want to vote for it, you can stand up with the 1 or 2 
percent of the people who are against it, but allow those of us who 
want to represent the 97 or 98 percent of the people who are for it to 
have a vote, because we don't think that terrorists and criminals 
should be able to go to a gun show and purchase firearms, including AR-
15s, without a criminal background check. We don't think that.
  So, Mr. Speaker, we have got a consensus in America on this. Let's 
not stifle the consensus. Let's not choke off the ability of the 
American people and their representatives to govern. That is why we 
were sent here, to legislate.
  The essence of legislation is hearings. We have to hear the American 
people, we have to hear the experts, we have to collect the evidence. 
We have got to overturn the ban on the collection of statistics about 
gun violence that was imposed a few decades ago on the CDC. We have got 
to collect the information, and we have to act.
  The time for just prayers and meditation about the problem is long 
gone, as the young people from Parkland, Florida, have told us.
  They were told in the wake of the massacre: It is too early to start 
debating gun policy.
  They turned around, and they said: No. It is too late to be debating 
gun policy. This should have been done after Las Vegas. It should have 
been done after San Bernardino County. It should have been done after 
the Sandy Hook massacre. It should have been done after Virginia Tech.
  How many more massacres do we have to await before this Congress 
decides something really must be done? How many more massacres? That is 
what America is asking us, Mr. Speaker.
  Please, let's do our job. We have sworn an oath to the American 
people. Let's go and represent the public will, let's make it 
consistent with the Second Amendment, because it is very easy to do so. 
We proved it in the State of Maryland, and the Supreme Court has told 
us we can pass reasonable commonsense gun safety measures without 
violating anyone's rights.
  We have got a consensus in America. In Congress, we have got to do 
our job and let that consensus become the law.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________