[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.
____________________