[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 55 (Wednesday, March 24, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1746-S1759]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          LEGISLATIVE SESSION

                                 ______
                                 

              PPP EXTENSION ACT OF 2021--MOTION TO PROCEED

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Cloture having been invoked, the Senate will 
resume legislative session and the motion to proceed to H.R. 1799, 
which the clerk will report.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 11, H.R. 1799, an act to 
     amend the Small Business Act and the CARES Act to extend the 
     covered period for the paycheck protection program, and for 
     other purposes.

  PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.


                           Order of Business

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following 
morning business tomorrow, Thursday, March 25, all postcloture time on 
the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 11, H.R. 1799, the PPP Extension 
Act, be considered expired and the motion to proceed be agreed to; that 
the only amendments in order be the following: Kennedy, No. 1401; 
Rubio, No. 1405; further, that it be in order for Senator Paul or his 
designee to raise a Budget Act point of order; finally, that at 11 a.m. 
tomorrow, the Senate vote in relation to the amendments in the order 
listed and on the motion to waive, if made; that if the motion to waive 
is agreed to, the bill be considered read a third time and the Senate 
vote on passage of the bill as amended, if amended, with 60 affirmative 
votes required for passage, all with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.

[[Page S1747]]

  



                              Gun Violence

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, it is hard to believe that I am on this 
floor again after losing 10 more people, this time in Boulder, CO, to 
another horrible mass shooting in our State.
  I am sure the Presiding Officer doesn't remember that last week, 
after the events in Atlanta, I went over to his desk, and I said that 
we were so sorry in Colorado for what had happened in Atlanta, and 
then, just 3 or 4 days later, it happened again in Colorado.
  I have spent the last day learning about the victims of this terrible 
crime, and I want America to know what extraordinary human beings we 
have lost in my State. Here they are.
  Denny Stong, age 20. Denny was a graduate of Fairview High School, an 
introverted, smart kid who loved history and model airplanes.
  He had been covering shifts at the King Soopers and took enormous 
pride in his role as an essential worker during this pandemic. He once 
posted on Facebook, ``I can't stay home. I am a Grocery Store Worker.''
  Neven Stanisic, age 23. Neven's dad said he was, ``a really good boy, 
a good kid . . . a hard-working boy.''
  His parents are refugees from Bosnia, who left in the 1990s to escape 
the war. The reverend at their local church said: ``His family fled the 
war . . . and everything they had was either left behind or destroyed.
  ``They left everything to save their lives, and came here to have a 
new start,'' said the pastor.
  They came to America to have a new start, only to have their son's 
life ended by this senseless act of violence.
  Rikki Olds was 25 years old. Rikki had been working as a manager at 
King Soopers for 6 years. Her family described her as a ``firecracker'' 
who lit up a room with her infectious giggle. Her Aunt Lori said: ``She 
had a beautiful way of just being her. . . . When you're down, she just 
wanted to cheer you up, just by being around.''
  Tralona Bartkowaik, age 49. She co-owned a clothing and accessory 
store, Umba Love, with her sister, and was a frequent presence in the 
Boulder arts and music scene.
  She had a deep curiosity about the world that took her on travel from 
Nepal to Costa Rica. Her younger brother remembers her as ``a beam of 
light.''
  Teri Leiker, age 51. She was a huge fan of the Buffalos at CU, a 
regular face at the Pearl Street Stampede. A friend called Teri ``the 
most selfless, innocent, amazing person I have had the honor of 
meeting.''
  Suzanne Fountain, 59 years old. She worked for 15 years in the 
Boulder Community Hospital. She loved gardening and was passionate 
about music and theater. A friend described her as ``the cream of the 
crop and a good person, a good soul.''
  Kevin Mahoney, age 61. Kevin had worked in the hotel business but 
retired early to spend more time traveling, skiing, and visiting his 
daughter Erika.
  After learning of her father's death, Erica wrote: ``My dad 
represents all things Love. I am so thankful he could walk me down the 
aisle last summer.''
  Lynn Murray, age 62. Lynn was a mother of two and a retired photo 
director for prominent national magazines.
  Her husband John said: ``I just want her to be remembered as this 
amazing, amazing comet, spending 62 years flying across the sky.''
  Jody Waters, 65 years old. Jody owned a boutique clothing store named 
Applause on Pearl Street Mall, where she remembered all her customers 
and their favorite brands. She was a mother of two and a grandmother 
who loved horses and hiking. A friend said: When Jody walked into the 
room, ``she was a breath of fresh air, a light.''
  Finally, Officer Eric Talley. He is 51 years old. He is a man of deep 
faith and a devoted father of seven. After losing a close friend to a 
DUI, he joined the police academy at age 40, just 11 years ago, to give 
back to the community.
  In 2013, he made headlines when he helped rescue 11 ducklings from a 
drainage ditch.
  Eric's father said: He ``loved his kids and family more than 
anything.'' For their sake he was hoping to stay off the frontlines by 
learning to become a drone operator. But when the bullets rang out, he 
rushed into action, first on the scene, saving countless lives at the 
cost of his own.
  Officer Talley and these other folks represent the best of Colorado, 
and we certainly owe Officer Talley a debt of gratitude that we will 
never be able to repay.
  My heart goes out to all the families and the entire community of 
Boulder. We have endured too many tragedies in this State. So many 
other States are the same here.
  The shootings at Columbine High School happened right before my 
oldest daughter was born, Caroline. She is 21 years old, and her entire 
generation has grown up in the shadow of gun violence--something none 
of us had to do.
  I remember after a gunman in Las Vegas took the lives of 59 
Americans. That Monday I came to work and realized during the course of 
the day that I was having meeting after meeting after meeting, and 
nobody was mentioning the massacre of 59 Americans. I don't know if it 
was two or three or four of these events before that that we began to 
somehow accept this as normal--that we can lose that many people and 
not have a conversation about what had happened, the headlines all 
moving on to the next thing.
  We can't allow this to become normal, and it is not just the mass 
shootings. It is the daily shootings. The Presiding Officer and I 
talked about it last week, what happened in Atlanta over the last 
couple of weekends, or on the West Side of Chicago. So we can't move 
on.
  Boulder will heal, but this scar will always be there. My daughter's 
generation will always bear the burden of a national government that 
did nothing to protect them. They and the children that I used to work 
for in the Denver Public Schools carry a burden that we didn't carry. 
They have grown up with a reasonable fear that they will be shot in 
their classrooms or in their schools or at a movie theater or in any 
public place.
  I didn't grow up in an America with more gun-related deaths than 
virtually any country in this world, and we can't accept it for their 
America. I am not asking anybody here to show the courage that Officer 
Talley showed or the other men and women of law enforcement who 
constantly have to deal with the inability of this place's capacity to 
deal with these issues. I am just asking us to show an ounce of their 
courage by doing whatever we can to keep weapons of war out of our 
community, to pass universal background checks, to limit the size of 
magazines, and to address the epidemic crisis of mental health in this 
country. It seems like that would be the least that we could do.
  In the wake of one of these incidents, I heard somebody say on a 
radio program that this is just the price of freedom, that these 
murders are the price of freedom. What a shame that somebody would say 
that and mean it. What a surrender that represents to our children and 
to the victims of these crimes. What a sacrifice of their right to be 
free from fear
  Who are we to insist that they live terrified in their own country? 
Nobody insisted that we live that way.
  But our failure to act has helped create these conditions, and we 
can't wait any longer. The Senate needs to act. There is nobody else to 
act but the U.S. Senate.
  I want to end by thanking my colleagues from Connecticut, Senator 
Blumenthal and Senator Murphy, for their incredibly steadfast 
leadership for long before they came to the Senate. But I remember one 
of the darkest moments of my Senate career, the votes that we took 
after Newtown, when that elementary school, Sandy Hook, was shot up and 
20 students were killed, and this Senate couldn't even pass universal 
background checks. They are here tonight to continue to make the case 
that we need to act, and I want to again thank them for their 
resilience and for caring about the people who lived and died in 
Colorado. I am extremely grateful for their example.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my friend Senator Bennet for those 
remarks, for honoring the memories of those we have lost and commanding 
us to action.
  I remember getting a phone call from Michael Bennet that Friday 
morning as Senator Blumenthal and I were sitting at a firehouse in 
Sandy Hook, CT,

[[Page S1748]]

learning what had happened just around the corner at a schoolhouse.
  I remember getting advice from Michael Bennet about what you do as an 
elected official in the midst of this tragedy because he had already 
been through it once before. Colorado had already been through it more 
than once before.
  I think about this macabre club that an increasing number of Members 
of the Senate and House belong to in which we have this memory bank of 
what to do when a mass shooting happens in your district or your 
State--a set of capacities that no Member of the House or Senate, no 
Governor ever had to think about or ever consider possessing decades 
ago. Now, we call each other when these things happen to impart advice 
as to how to be helpful to communities that are grieving.
  I am thankful to have friends like Senator Bennet, who can be with 
others at moments like this, but I hate the fact that he knows all too 
well what communities go through when something happens like happened 
earlier this week in Boulder.
  We thought about what to do to try to move this country and our 
colleagues to action after another spate of mass shootings. This is a 
really old chart that I brought down to the floor for years. These 
numbers are out of date, unfortunately, because, well, in 2019, we were 
losing 100 people a day from gun violence. That is not the number from 
2020 or 2021. We have seen a dramatic increase in gun violence.
  While in 2020 we didn't see the mass shootings that we have been 
accustomed to in years prior, we are now seeing them once again pop up 
on our TV screens in 2021. But the lack of mass shootings masked the 
reality, which was a dramatic increase in the number of people who were 
felled by guns over the course of last year. We thought about what we 
could do to try to make more real for our colleagues the scope of this 
epidemic, and we thought of maybe something simple, you know, to make 
people understand that these aren't really numbers. The numbers are 
just a way to explain in aggregate who these people are, because each 
one of them is an individual. Each one of them led a life. Each one of 
them had people who loved them. Each one of them loved people. So many 
of them, you can just see by these snapshots, were young. They had full 
lives ahead of them, businesses to start, and families to begin. None 
of that happened for them because they were shot, often at the 
beginning or the peak of their early life.

  So tonight I am hopeful that I will be joined by a number of my 
colleagues to do something simple, just to read into the Record, the 
permanent Congressional Record, the names of those who have died just 
in 2021. Every single day, there are over 100 people dying right now. I 
don't think America has ever seen this rate of gun violence, with the 
exception of wartime, in our history.
  While we won't have time to tell you the story of all these people, 
as Michael did about those whom we lost in Boulder, at least we can 
make sure that forever their name and a link to their story is in the 
Congressional Record.
  Senator Bennet already talked about Lynn Murray and Suzanne Fountain, 
Teri Leiker, Kevin Mahoney, Tralona Bartkowiak, Rikki Olds, Neven 
Stanisic, Denny Stong, Jody Waters, and Eric Talley. Those are the 
victims from Colorado. I am sorry if I didn't get the pronunciations 
perfectly. But we also lost, over the course of the first 3 months of 
this year Patrice Lynette Jones in Indiana; Kelvin Darnell from 
Illinois; Kevon Dickerson from Kentucky; Leah Brooke Hines from Ohio; 
Linda McMurry in Tennessee; Michael Uttley in Missouri; Jarrea Gardner 
in Pennsylvania; Robert Randall Turner III from Maryland; Maddox Jones 
in Georgia; Joseph Jackson in Florida.
  On Monday, the same day as the shooting, in Boulder, Alessia 
Mesquita, 28 years old, was shot and killed in New Haven, CT, with her 
1-year-old daughter sitting in the back seat of her car. She and her 
boyfriend were arguing in the car when he shot her to death. According 
to her mother, Alessia had been trying to leave her boyfriend.
  Alessia is described as a devoted mother who loved her children with 
all of her heart. Many of her friends really relied on her for advice 
and guidance. They said she would give the shirt off her back to help a 
friend.
  Her mom said:

       My heart has been shattered, and I don't think I'm ever 
     going to be right again.

  She was the second of eight children. She had two children of her 
own, and her mother will now raise her two grandchildren.
  Nobody heard about Alessia Mesquita being shot with her daughter in 
the back seat in New Haven, CT, on Monday. Her life isn't less valuable 
than any of those who were killed in mass shootings. But this country's 
attention to the pandemic of gun violence, the epidemic of gun 
violence, seems to surface only when there is a mass shooting.
  Benjamin Bagley was shot last week in Bridgeport, CT. He was 22 years 
old. He was remembered by friends and family as somebody who always 
kept a smile on the faces of people who loved him. He was a doting 
father. He was a loving son and brother and always made people smile.
  His friends wrote:

       He was taken from us far before his light was fully able to 
     shine its brightest.

  He was one of six siblings, two brothers and four sisters. He had two 
children and one on the way. He was born and raised in Bridgeport. He 
was involved in his church.
  His mom Michelle Brown said:

       I had to kiss my son lying in a hospital bed dead. I don't 
     wish this on nobody, not even my worst enemy.

  This wasn't the first time Benjamin had been shot. He had been 
previously wounded in a shooting in 2016, but he had recovered.
  Kevin Jang was 26 years old. About a month and a half ago, in early 
February, he was killed by gun violence. He had moved to New Haven just 
2 years ago to pursue a master's degree at the Yale School of the 
Environment. He was a west coast native. He had gotten engaged 1 week 
before his death. He had earned a degree. He was an Army veteran. He 
was a present Army National Guard member.
  He was shot outside his fiance's apartment. His fiance said:

       Kevin was . . . a gift from God. He was a true and 
     righteous man after God's own heart. Life is so precious and 
     short. My only hope is that he is with his Heavenly Father 
     now in perfect peace.

  ``An extraordinary young man,'' said Yale University's president.
  I mean, I have a stack of names, 20, 25 per page. We don't have 
enough time tonight to read into the Record the number of victims of 
gun violence in 2021 alone--alone. There is Adam Todd Saeed from South 
Carolina; Andrew Wesley from Ohio; Antonio Rowban Thompson from South 
Carolina; Artrell Conner, Louisiana; Beau Michael Wasmer, West 
Virginia; Brittany Wagoner-Moore in Ohio; Byron ``B'' Donnell Ross in 
Texas; Carolyn Ann Stephenson, North Carolina; Christian Parra, New 
Jersey; Christopher Bess, Illinois; David Caballero, California; David 
Prince, Illinois; Dean Wagstaff, Washington; Devin Dawkins, Missouri; 
Dolores Reyes, California; Eric Thompson, Tennessee; Glorida Dean 
Eddington Lewis, Ohio; Harold Edward Dennison, West Virginia; Javontae 
Hendricks, Illinois; Jeffrey Gillespie, Mississippi; Justin Bartley 
Williams, Texas; Keldrick Love, Louisiana; Kiron Golden, Alabama; 
Lesean Long, Illinois; Malcolm Fitts, Illinois; Marcel Tramon Pimpton, 
Texas; Mario Vines, Oklahoma; Melissa Marie Nease, Florida; Nestor 
Gregorio, Texas; Pedro Arturo Delgado Tagle, Texas; Rene Hernandez, 
Texas; Robert ``Trey'' Scott III, Indiana; Ryan Abraham Whiteis-Saks, 
Minnesota; Satnam Singh, Utah; Shamso Gedi-Abdi, Minnesota; Teresa 
Ratliff, Ohio; Thomas ``TJ'' Carr, Ohio; Timothy Alfred Nelson, Texas; 
Timothy Dugar Ohio; Tony Nichols, Missouri; Tre'Veon D. Buckner; Victor 
Zuniga; Xavier Crosby; Adam David-Lawrence Arrambide; Bobby King; 
Brandon Chunko; Carol Tinsley; Cecilia Apolo; Christian Joseph Jones; 
Christopher Benton McLeod; Cory McHaffie; Curtis Lee Upshaw; DeAndre 
Carter; Dominicko Howell; Donnell Hoskin; Grayson Babbs; Jamie Bull. It 
is two pages. I have 20 more here. My colleagues will hopefully join me 
on the floor tonight to read some of these names into the Record.

  This is as astonishing as it is heartbreaking. This country allows 
for this to happen, allows these individuals to effectively be nameless 
and to be anonymous. Tonight we are reading into the Record only the 
names of individuals

[[Page S1749]]

who died in this year, and the year isn't even 90 days old. How is it 
that we pay attention during the mass shootings but just sleep through 
the days in which all of these people are stolen from us through an 
epidemic that is preventable?
  This doesn't happen anywhere else in the high-income world. No other 
nation permits this level of gun violence. Don't tell me it is the 
price of admission to America. Don't tell me it is not preventable. 
Don't tell me it is inevitable. It only happens here. It only happens 
here, and it is really hard to comprehend the impact this has on 
people.
  I was in an elementary school in Baltimore, MD, about 2 years ago. I 
had gone there to see an afterschool program that I had heard was very 
successful. The school had started about an hour late that day because 
of a weather delay, and so when I was inside the school, at about 10 
o'clock, kids were still just arriving.
  I went upstairs to join the young lady who ran this program, and we 
were about a half an hour into our conversation when buzzers started 
going off, and the lights flickered, and the intercom system lit up 
with somebody from the central office repeating over and over again: 
Code green, code green, code green.
  I didn't know what a code green was. The person I was meeting with, 
who was just running this afterschool program, didn't know what code 
green was.
  Luckily, the front office called up and told us that ``code green'' 
means there has been an active shooting somewhere in and around the 
school and that everybody needs to turn the lights off, lock the doors, 
and shut the blinds. So that is what we did.
  It was 10:30 in the morning. After about 20 minutes, code green 
ended, lights turned back on, and we continued our discussion. I was 
shaken.
  This is a school I had never set foot in. I had only been there about 
20 minutes, and there was an active shooting within a handful of 
blocks. So I wanted to know what happened. I stayed in touch with 
personnel at the school. I read the Baltimore papers over the course of 
the next few days to find out what had happened, and here is what I 
found out. A young man by the name of Corey Dodd, who lived just down 
the street from the school, had told his wife--I believe her name is 
Marissa, if I remember correctly--that he would drop their twins off at 
Matthew Henson Elementary School that morning. They had two other kids. 
She was busy with them. He said: I will drop the kids off this morning.
  So he drove the kids to Matthew Henson Elementary School, the twin 
girls, and brought them into the building. I could have been in that 
lobby with him that morning as I was coming in and he was leaving. He 
got into his car. He drove a few blocks home, and in between his car 
and the door, he was shot dead--10 o'clock in the morning.
  His little girl, the youngest, always waited for him at the door when 
he was arriving. Well, he never showed up to that door because he died 
that day. And his two little twin girls in that school at the same time 
that I was there, who might have been giggling as they took a break 
from instruction and the lights went off, and they got to chat with 
their friends, didn't know that they were never going to see their 
father again.
  Think about it, how the lives of those children change when their dad 
vanishes from the Earth just like that. Think about how the lives of 
all the children in that school change when they have to contemplate 
the fact that their dads might not be home when they arrive next week 
or the week after, if it could happen to Mr. Dodd. Think about how the 
entire neighborhood goes through trauma after trauma when that happens 
so routinely in a place like Baltimore.
  You can't understand the scope of this epidemic by just reading off 
these names. Adam Todd Saeed died. Jason Wilson died. Jath Burns died. 
Johnjairo Brito died. Johnnie Clark died. Jonathan Joseph died. Jose 
Medero died. Joseph Carney died. Justin Locklear died. Justin Marshall 
died of gun violence. So did Kristen Slack and Latarous Harris and 
Lieutenant Justin Bedwell.
  They all died of gunshot wounds just in 2021, but they simply 
represent the surface. You scratch just a bit, and you will find their 
kids and their moms and their dads and their neighbors who are going 
through trauma right now because of their deaths.
  Research tells us that often there are 20 people who experience 
definable trauma when someone close to them dies. And so even the names 
that we read into the record tonight don't accurately represent the 
scope of this trauma. Those kids' lives will never ever be the same in 
Sandtown, the neighborhood of Baltimore in which this elementary school 
sits, neither will be the lives of those kids who go to that school.
  And maybe what was so inexplicable to me was that I had to work 
really hard to find out anything about that young man. It was barely a 
story the next day that he had died bringing his daughters to school 
and then returning home. Had there been six more people shot, maybe it 
would have made the papers. Maybe America would have paid attention.
  But think of it this way: What if that same story played out not in 
Baltimore, MD, with an African-American father and African-American 
girls, what if that story played out in Westport, CT, with a White 
father and two twin, blond-haired, White girls? Do we care less because 
Corey was African American? You better believe it. You better believe 
that headline news would have been running stories about an affluent, 
White, suburban father dropping his kids off at an affluent, White, 
suburban school and being shot before he entered his suburban home.
  We don't care about individual loss of life like we care about the 
victims of mass shootings. That is a tragedy. We also don't care about 
the loss of Black life. We don't care about the people of color who die 
in the same way that we care when White people die in this country. 
That is just the truth.
  So, tonight, my colleagues and I are going to come to the floor--and 
I hope some will join me. I thank Senator Blumenthal for being here to 
start us off--to read into the Record the names of individuals who have 
been lost to gun violence in 2021 as a way to make sure we recognize 
who they were and the lives that they led, but also as a last-gasp 
effort to try to convince our colleagues to do something.
  Tonight isn't really going to be the night to go deep into policy. 
Senator Bennet talked about what we know we need to do. We can have 
that debate at another time. Tonight is a night to just recognize the 
scope of this epidemic, how many people are being lost, how many lives 
are being impacted in mass shootings and in individual acts of 
violence, in homicides and suicides and domestic violence incidences. 
And maybe, maybe by pounding into people's brains the human toll of 
this tragedy in mass shootings and in other forms, we can inch this 
body a little bit closer to doing the right thing.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am honored to follow my colleagues 
Senators Murphy and Bennet, two fellow champions of this cause.
  Again, again, we have stood here so many times to advocate for 
measures that very simply would make Americans safe.
  And I don't accept that it will be our last gasp. I don't accept that 
we will ever go away, that we will ever abandon this cause, no matter 
how long and how hard it is.
  Senator Murphy and I were in Sandy Hook the afternoon of that 
massacre. We went through an excruciatingly heartbreaking, gut-
wrenching, stunning experience, but nothing compared to the children 
who were taken out of the school. Nothing compared to the teachers who 
shepherded them. Nothing compared to anyone who lived through it or the 
emergency responders who had to see the scene of carnage that day and, 
of course, nothing approaching the trauma of parents and loved ones.
  So our club, as he called it, is one that pales in significance to 
the club of survivors and victims. It is more than the names we read 
tonight. It is the children who take cover when that code is rung. It 
is the teachers who suffer the apprehension of wondering whether that 
day will be the one when there is a shooter. It is the parents of all 
children who send their kids to school and wonder whether, at the end 
of the day, they will see them again. At some level, maybe not all, 
maybe not

[[Page S1750]]

always, not every day, but that fear in the gut, that powerfully 
important apprehension is there for many.
  When I was in elementary school, the fear was of nuclear 
annihilation. And the drills we did were to dive beneath our desks, as 
though somehow those desks could be protected in the midst of a nuclear 
attack. Absurd as it seems looking back, every one of us, during those 
years, wondered would that be the day. And on the days before the Cuban 
missile crisis, it became more real than ever.
  And for that generation, it was the fear For this generation, gun 
violence is the fear that lurks constantly in the heart, in the back of 
the mind, and always a presence.

  The names that we are going to read tonight are a very partial list 
of the injuries because we are reading the ones who died, but many 
others were injured severely and horrifically: bones shattered, flesh 
torn, futures changed forever, and, of course, the emotional trauma of 
living through it. But we have to read these names because it is part 
of our responsibility to make them real and to remind ourselves, as 
much as anyone, that this issue is a matter of life and death in the 
way that few others that we debate in this Chamber evoke.
  At the beginning of the Judiciary Committee hearing the other day, 
just this week, we had a moment of silence. But we cannot be silent. 
Yes, we will offer thoughts and prayers, but we cannot be silent, and 
we must do more than speak. We must act--honor with action.
  We cannot let these brave, wonderful souls go gently into this good 
night. We must rage, rage against the dying of the life. And that is 
what we are doing by reading these names, reminding ourselves that we 
cannot accept these deaths as a normal. Even with the pandemic 
receding, we hope, the epidemic of gun violence continues.
  A gun, a firearm, especially an assault weapon, makes fatal and 
irreversible some of the most serious problems. Whether it is domestic 
violence, suicide, or simply a profoundly disturbed young man walking 
into a grocery store, or a racist and misogynist man going into a spa, 
the involvement of guns and firearms makes those incidents deadly.
  The names that I will read will be of all ethnicities and religions 
and backgrounds and races because firearms can be an equal opportunity 
killer. But Senator Murphy is right that communities of color suffer 
disproportionately. And in Atlanta, who can doubt that a hate crime 
turned deadly, potentially, because of that gun.
  Dominick Boston, Brad Keel, Ildiko Papp, James Ray Huddleston, Glenda 
Swain Toms, Kayla Marie Keatts, Ethan Delicat, Paula Marie Booth, 
Raymond Robinson, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Hyun Jung Grant, Daoyou Feng, 
Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, Xiaojie Tan, Young Ae Yue, Paul Andre 
Michels.
  Last week, eight lives were taken by gun violence, and they should be 
remembered and their lives counted.
  Delaina Ashley Yaun was a 33-year-old newlywed and mother of two, 
including a daughter she gave birth to this summer. She put her family 
above all else and cared for family members and friends who needed help 
or a place to stay during tough times.
  Her manager said:

       Her heart was so big. She loved people.

  He describes how she would feed diners at the restaurant where she 
worked who were homeless and bring them home to offer them showers and 
clean clothes.
  One friend described Delaina as ``a light. She just made everybody 
happy. She loves to smile and joke and hang out with her kids and make 
sure they always had fun. She was a happy person.''
  Hyun Jung Grant was 51 years old. She worked as a schoolteacher in 
South Korea before immigrating to the United States. She was a hard-
working and loving single mother of two, who loved karaoke, dancing, 
and electronic music, and made the world's best kimchi stew.
  One of her sons, Randy, wrote:

       She was a single mother who dedicated her whole life to 
     providing for my brother and I. It is only my brother and I 
     in the United States. . . . She was one of my best friends 
     and the strongest influence on who we are today.

  Daoyou Feng was 44 years old. What we know about her from her friends 
is that she was sweet and kind. That is how she was described by her 
coworkers as well.
  Soon Chung Park was an active 74-year-old mother and mother-in-law. 
She lived in Atlanta. She moved there several years ago to be closer to 
friends. And she was well on her way to living past 100. Because of the 
pandemic, she missed chances to visit her family in the Northeast but 
was planning to move back this summer to be closer to relatives and 
friends.

  Her son-in-law described that Soon ``just liked to work. It wasn't 
for the money. She just wanted a little bit of work for her life.''
  Suncha Kim, 69 years old. She was married for more than 50 years, and 
she was a fighter and a rock for her two children and three 
grandchildren. She was a hard worker and enjoyed line dancing.
  Suncha came to the United States around 1980. She spoke little 
English and worked two to three jobs, putting her children first and 
always seeking to help others. She volunteered by cooking and 
fundraising. One of her grandchildren wrote:

       My grandmother was an angel. . . . As an immigrant, all my 
     grandmother ever wanted in life was to grow old with my 
     grandfather and watch her children and grandchildren live the 
     life she never got to live.

  Xiaojie Tan, killed that day, before her 50th birthday. She was a 
dedicated wife, mother, friend. She was devoted to her job and 
dedicated to her fellow employees. Her husband said:

       She donated and gave money to her employees and treated 
     them so well. She was always celebrating their birthdays, 
     doing good things for them.

  She was curious, hard-working, and caring, always filled with joy. 
She worked long hours, every day, to give her family a better life. Her 
daughter said that Xiao was her best friend and that ``[s]he did 
everything for me and the family. She provided everything.''
  Yong Ae Yue, 63 years old. She was an amazing mother of two sons and 
loved to cook Korean food. She came to the United States in the 1970s, 
and after being laid off during the pandemic, she was excited to be 
back at work. She enjoyed visiting friends, watching movies and soap 
operas, and reading. She always loved to read and have her dog at her 
side.
  Paul Andre Michels. He was a 54-year-old Army veteran, one of nine 
children, and he had been married for more than 20 years. He loved to 
fish and collect rare coins. He treated everyone like he was their 
uncle and did what he could to help others.
  One friend said of Paul that ``[h]e would give you the shirt off his 
back.''
  His younger brother, John, said:

       He'd loan you money if you needed it sometimes. You never 
     went away from his place hungry.

  My home State of Connecticut is not immune to gun violence. Sandy 
Hook is the best known of the tragedies, but there are others--many, 
many, many others--all around the State, in big cities, in small towns, 
in rural areas, suburban.
  Nobody is immune. Nobody is protected against gun violence so long as 
the pipeline, the iron pipeline, even with Connecticut's strong laws, 
draws guns across State borders.
  Here are some of the names and stories of people whose lives have 
been taken in Connecticut:
  Jaqhawn Walters was killed on September 19, 2020, in Hartford. He was 
24 years old. His mother Trician writes:

       There was an altercation with someone inside a store. The 
     fight was broken up, but the other young man still shot him 
     and then stood over him a second time and shot him again.
       Jaqhawn was a college graduate. He was known as a big 
     basketball player for Albertus Magnus. He played overseas for 
     two seasons before COVID hit.
       My son saw a lot of gun violence growing up in the city, 
     and he became victim to it even though he tried his best to 
     beat all odds with a bachelor's degree in communications.
       He even played in Argentina as a professional basketball 
     player, mentored kids through basketball. He got a 
     proclamation for his work at the Parker Memorial Center and 
     the Village, where he worked with troubled kids.

  Jaqhawn's coach at Albertus Magnus described him as ``the type of kid 
that got along with everyone. His likability crossed every age 
generation. When I ran camp, 8-year-old kids, instantly, he was the 
guy. They'd all gravitate toward him. Same thing with our team.

[[Page S1751]]

They loved him. Opponents loved him. I've gotten a lot of texts, and I 
got one from a Northeast coach who said, `He had that thing where he'd 
drop 30 [points] on you, and every opponent not only respected him but 
genuinely liked him.' ''
  Another coach said:

       Jaqhawn was very, very rooted in the Hartford community, 
     and he loved his town. So he was always going to be one of 
     those people that came back and gave as much as he was able.

  Another coach said:

       He had such an impact. The guy had so much more to give.

  That is the story of every one of these victims: so much more to 
give; so much more to give back, whether to Hartford or sons and 
daughters or parents.
  Ethan Song was killed in Guilford on January 31, 2018, 12 days after 
his 15th birthday, with an unsecured firearm in his neighbor's house. 
He lived a life filled with laughter, adventure, and passion. He lived 
with adoring family members Kristin and Michael Song.
  Ethan loved to ski and hike and play spikeball too. He helped his mom 
Kristin in finding homes for abandoned puppies. Ethan loved food. He 
and his dad Mike ventured to find the best lobster roll in New England. 
They sampled 15 locations.
  He loved lacrosse, and he was good at it, making the all-star team 
one season. He was always interested in his family's history. He tried 
to learn all that he could about his grandmother's experience as a 
Holocaust survivor and went so far as to divert a family trip to the UK 
to see the Anne Frank house in the Netherlands.
  Ethan was also fascinated by his grandfather's experience as a 
decorated intelligence officer in the Korean war.
  I am always so inspired by Kristin and Michael Song and Ethan's 
sister, their strength and courage, their joy in life, and their 
unquenchable loyalty and love for Ethan. I have stood on the green in 
Guilford announcing my introduction of Ethan's Law, a safe storage law 
that they have championed with grace and dignity and power beyond 
words.
  And let's say it out loud: This gun violence is every parent's worst 
nightmare, every parent's worst fear--going to school, going to a 
neighbor's house, going to a grocery store--wrong place at the wrong 
time: a neighbor's house where a firearm was unsafely stored, watching 
the emergency response team pull to that neighbor's house and knowing 
something is terribly, terribly wrong. Every parent's worst nightmare.
  And Lori Jackson's parents know very graphically about that nightmare 
because their daughter, Lori Jackson, of Oxford, CT, came to their 
house seeking refuge from an estranged husband. And that night, while 
her infant children slept, Lori Jackson was gunned down by that 
husband, who was under a protective order which should have barred his 
having a firearm, but at that point Connecticut law applied only to 
permanent protective orders.
  She was killed by that man even though he was under a protective 
order. She was 32 years old. She was a loving daughter and a mother of 
twins. And her mother also was severely injured.
  And her parents, with that same grace and dignity and strength and 
courage, have championed protection for domestic violence victims and 
survivors.
  She had so much to give--like Ethan, like so many others.
  And we remember Noah, Charlotte, Jack, Olivia, Dylan, Catherine, 
Avielle, Jessica, James, Josephine, Caroline, Benjamin, Chase, Ana, 
Grace, Emilie, Madeleine, Allison, Daniel, and Jesse--20 beautiful, 
innocent children taken at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown more 
than 8 years ago.
  We remember them for bringing bursts of light and laughter into the 
lives of their family and friends, for bringing love into the lives of 
all who knew them, and for their joy and boundless energy. Only 6 years 
old, but they had so much to give, and their lives cut short at Sandy 
Hook that day.
  And we remember the heroism of those brave, courageous educators that 
December morning: Victoria, Lauren, Anne Marie, Rachel, Mary, and Dawn. 
We remember their courage, some of them physically shielding students 
with their own bodies, running unhesitatingly toward danger, 
barricading classrooms, drawing on all their reserves of calm and 
professionalism to protect and shield the children in their care.
  We read these names, I feel, almost as a form of prayer. We cannot 
save any of these victims, but we know we can save others. And that is 
our work.
  As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural speech, ``here on earth 
God's work must truly be our own.'' Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Nevada.
  Ms. CORTEZ MASTO. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues. 
At this juncture, it is hard to find the words. How many more 
shootings, how many more individuals have to die before we take action? 
And I rise because the Senator--my colleague, the great Senator from 
Connecticut--was identifying these names as a form of prayer, which I 
could not have said that better, because this is about recognizing 
those we have lost in order to prevent future loss of life.
  So I join them to recognize individuals across the country and in my 
home State of Nevada who have lost their lives: Vincent Brown of 
Colorado; Zaimier Bell of New Jersey; Anthony Stanley of Missouri; Bao 
Yang, Minnesota; Daisy Navarrete of Texas; David Camacho, Rhode Island; 
Deonte Minor, Washington, DC; Ronald B. Williams from Indiana. All of 
these individuals were killed by gun violence. And just those names 
would be too many. Yet they represent a few and a heartbreakingly long 
list of victims, families, and communities whose lives have been ripped 
apart by senseless gun violence just this year.
  Sadly, my home State of Nevada has been no stranger to this pain. In 
Las Vegas, on October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire on a crowd of 
thousands of people at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. He killed 
58 people that night. Two more victims have since died from injuries 
they received that evening. And hundreds, hundreds more were injured--
people who just wanted to enjoy an evening of celebration with their 
friends and family.
  I know the fear and the trauma that so many families experienced that 
day. My niece was at that concert, and my family and I are incredibly 
grateful that she made it home safely. But I will never forget--never 
forget--on that Monday after the horrific shooting that took place, 
sitting at the Reconciliation Center in Las Vegas with the families, 
with the parents, the uncles, the aunts, the siblings, who were waiting 
to find out what happened to their loved one.
  Can you imagine? It is the most horrific thing any family member 
could go through. You are waiting to hear what happened to your family 
member--your child, your son, daughter, your niece, your nephew, your 
father, your mother--and you are hoping that as time and the clock 
ticks away, your child is not one that is in the backroom with a 
coroner right now.
  I cannot tell you how heartbreaking it was to be with those families 
and talking to them and the fear and the anxiety and the helplessness 
and the hope that still they clung to that they would find out that 
their child or their brother or their mother or sister was really safe 
somewhere in one of the hospitals in Las Vegas.
  No one can imagine that, and no one should have to imagine it. And no 
one should ever have to go through that. But that is what families and 
loved ones have been going through over the years because of the 
senseless gun violence that is happening across this country.
  Every day, more than 100 families lose a loved one to gun violence. 
Austin Cooper Meyer, age 24, from Sparks, NV; Brennan Lee Stewart, age 
30, from North Las Vegas; Cameron Lee Robinson, age 28, from Las Vegas; 
Charleston Hartfield, age 34, from Henderson, NV, a police officer; 
Erick Steven Silva, age 21, from Las Vegas; Laura Ann Shipp, age 50, 
from Las Vegas; Neysa Christina Tonks, age 46, from Las Vegas; Quinton 
Joe Robbins, age 20, from Henderson--those are just 8 of the 60 
Americans who lost their lives during the Route 91 Harvest festival 
shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, and their names and stories will 
stick with us forever.
  But we also have to remember the loved ones they have left behind. So

[[Page S1752]]

many of these names I know now not just because of the horrific 
shooting but because I have met their family members whom they have 
left behind--children who were left behind, children who lost their 
parent to this horrific gunfire, husbands and wives, mothers and 
fathers. It just goes on and on and on.
  In the next few minutes, I want to share some stories of Nevadans 
whose lives have been altered by gun violence. Many of these stories 
are heartbreaking, and they stem from the October 1 mass shooting that 
took place in Las Vegas.
  Before I talk about them, however, I have to also recognize and 
praise the many heroes who stood up and worked to protect our community 
that night.
  After the bullets stopped raining down on the Las Vegas Strip, a 
former marine turned a truck into a makeshift ambulance and drove more 
than two dozen people to one of our hospitals. A couple provided CPR to 
injured victims on the site. And hundreds of concertgoers risked their 
lives carrying fellow concertgoers to safety.
  In fact, many younger attendees already had a sense of what to do to 
stop the bleeding from bullet holes and knew to run for safety in the 
breaks in between the sounds o gunshots because of training they had 
received in their schools and workplaces.

  But after the shooting, I received a letter from a constituent who 
survived the Las Vegas shooting, and she wrote:

       On October 1st, 2017, our life was forever changed. . . . 
     My husband and I attended the Route 91 Harvest Festival. We 
     were having the time of our lives, enjoying the different 
     bands we got to see and singing along with all our favorite 
     songs. [My husband] and I were so moved when [one of the 
     bands] led the audience singing God Bless America. Who would 
     have known that just a few hours later our lives would be 
     changed forever?
       When the shooting . . . started, I thought it was 
     firecrackers. We looked around and then there were more 
     shots. My husband pulled me to the ground, laying on top of 
     me, shielding me from gunfire. He laid there tense waiting to 
     be shot while I laid there waiting for him to go limp. We 
     prayed and told each other we loved [one] another. I prayed 
     we would live to see our children raise their children and I 
     felt Jesus' hands covering us. During a pause in the 
     shooting, my husband pulled me up to start running. I was 
     terrified, [because] we could hear bullets whizzing by and 
     [we] could smell gun powder. There were three people, that I 
     know of, who were shot right around us. The shooting 
     continued for what felt like forever. We continued running 
     and ran across Las Vegas Boulevard while the shooting 
     continued. There was so much confusion and we didn't know if 
     there were more shooters.
       By the grace of God, my husband [and] I are unharmed 
     physically. Our emotional scars are still to be determined. 
     Sleeping has been difficult. I have had periods of 
     uncontrollable shaking. I have chronic stomach pain and have 
     . . . difficulty eating. All of this seems trivial compared 
     to the families who have lost mothers, fathers, sons, and 
     daughters and the hundreds of people still suffering with 
     physical injuries.

  Now, I read that letter because it is not just, as I have said 
before, about the lives we have lost, but it is about the lives who are 
affected by gun violence. Reading that letter is just heartbreaking--
and to think that her trauma is experienced by so many other Americans 
from Las Vegas, from Parkland, from Orlando, and from Boulder. It is a 
stain on our Nation.
  And I have, since that shooting, been able to meet so many incredible 
survivors of this shooting, including two sisters, the Marano sisters, 
who were at the concert that night and are still living with the 
emotional scars from being there in that horrific shooting.
  Geena Marano has learned to prepare herself for Independence Day and 
New Year's Eve, when the sounds of fireworks can sound eerily similar 
to gunfire. But if a car backfires unexpectedly, she has to start the 
process of reminding herself: ``You're safe. It's OK. Don't worry.''
  And her sister Marisa, who was also at the festival, says her own 
daughter has picked up on the habit of reacting to loud noises. She 
said: ``It breaks my heart because my trauma has [now] passed on to 
her.''
  The fear resurfaces for these sisters in so many situations: on 
anniversaries, including of all the shootings since then; at high 
schools, where Geena was doing outreach to students and feared that she 
was putting herself at risk of another shooting; passing the Strip, 
eerily during the COVID pandemic, like it was on the day of the 
festival, because the Strip was shut down. Anywhere there is darkness 
and music, even on an evening out, the sisters still feel the 
repercussions of that night at the concert.
  And they are not alone. While the tragedy of the Route 91 shooting 
may be 3 years behind us, for many survivors a moment can bring it all 
roaring back, and many more live in fear that it could happen again.
  Telemachus Orfanos, a survivor of the Route 91 Harvest Festival 
shooting, was killed when a gunman entered the Borderline Bar & Grill 
and shot 12 innocent people on November 7, 2018.
  What happened to Telemachus and other October 1 survivors in the 
restaurant that night was a uniquely American phenomenon that we should 
not be proud of. We keep having these mass shootings in our country, 
and it is past time that we acted. It is not only what our Nation 
deserves. It is what these families and these survivors and those who 
lost their lives deserve.
  The Nevadan who shared her October 1 experience with me ended her 
letter by stating:

       I am urging you to pass thoughtful, reasonable controls 
     that will enhance the safety of our society. It is time to 
     take . . . action to protect our mothers, fathers, sons, 
     daughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends. Please, do 
     not sit back and do nothing.

  And she is right. We cannot sit back and do nothing. We must pass 
commonsense gun legislation, like universal background checks that we 
have passed in the State of Nevada. That will help keep Americans safe. 
We owe it to our friends and families and all of the victims who have 
already been irrevocably marked by gun violence to take action.
  Thank you.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my friend Senator Cortez Masto for 
that powerful testimony, for sharing some of these stories talking 
about the impact on families in Las Vegas and throughout her State, and 
to talk about what this means from a parent's perspective, to think 
that her own family had to wonder whether their loved one was going to 
come back from that shooting that dominated the news, to think about 
how many lives were changed.
  Senator Blumenthal made a really important observation earlier and 
that was that the numbers we are using here, 39,000 people dying a 
year, and the names that we are reading into the Record, these are the 
names of the individuals who have died, but what we know is there are 
hundreds of thousands of others who have survived gunshot wounds. The 
trauma is different, but it is still serious and acute.
  When a loved one is shot, obviously, that comes with a moral 
disruption to the family that is hard to calculate. Often that injury 
has lifelong consequences. The individual is bound to a wheelchair, 
losing the use of legs and arms. These are serious consequences that 
affect the rest of your life.
  While today we are reading into the Record the names of those who 
have died, this stack represents, I think, just a fraction of those who 
have died in 2021. It could be four times as high if we had talked 
about those who have been injured in episodes of gun violence.
  Other colleagues are going to join us here tonight on the floor. 
While they do, let me just read into the Record a handful of additional 
names: Carlesa Taylor; Cleveland Sanders; Cortney Smith, Missouri; 
Corporal Martinus Mitchum from Louisiana; Daniel Bonham from Georgia; 
Darrell Merriwether from Iowa; Devon Lon Remmel from Minnesota; 
Diontaye Petty from Kentucky; Gregory Marchand from Missouri; Gwendolyn 
McMillan from Georgia; Irvinn Villalba from New Mexico; Jakob Lee 
Haines from Pennsylvania; Jonatan Jose Martinez, Pennsylvania; Julian 
Castro, Illinois; Julie Lee Karvelis, Mississippi; Keith Hawkins, 
Arkansas; Lee Patrick David, West Virginia; Manyari Smith, Illinois; 
Mario Turner, Illinois; Marquise Jones, Louisiana; Nazeer Defares, 
California; Nicolette Sheridan Law, Pennsylvania; Officer Dominic Jared 
Winum, Virginia; Peter Vanvallis, Montana; Qualil Terrion Young, Texas; 
Raymond William Nieman, Kansas; Reginald Copning, Louisiana; Reginald 
James, California; Robert Bigger, Illinois.

[[Page S1753]]

  I am sure some cynical viewer tonight may listen to a name they 
recognize on this list and say: Oh, well, wait a second. I know that 
guy. He had a criminal record. That individual was involved with some 
bad people.
  There is never a justification for a gun homicide. No matter whether 
the individuals on these lists were perfect angels or individuals who 
had made mistakes, none of them deserved to die in an episode of 
vigilante or random justice. So to answer a hypothetical question, I 
haven't vetted the names that I am reading because not a single person 
on this list deserved to go in the way that they did.
  I remember talking to a woman who has become a friend in Hartford, 
CT. She lost her son just about a month before Sandy Hook. She 
remembers when Sandy Hook happened that she latched onto the number of 
children who were killed. Twenty kids were killed that day in Sandy 
Hook. I asked Senator Bennet were there survivors from the shooting in 
the supermarket in Boulder, and he said he had to check, and I will 
check as well, but he wasn't sure that there were individuals who were 
seriously injured. If that is the case, there are parallels to Sandy 
Hook.
  The weapons that are being used in these crimes are so lethal, so 
powerful that, increasingly, it is hard to survive wounds when a bullet 
enters your body at the speed that bullets are traveling when they come 
from an AR-15 or AR-15-style weapon as was used in Sandy Hook.
  In Sandy Hook, 20 kids were shot. All 20 of them died. The number 20 
wa meaningful to my friend because her son was 20 years old when he was 
killed on October 20 of 2012, the year of Sandy Hook. He was killed by 
a 20-year-old, and he was the 20th victim of gun violence that year in 
Hartford, CT.

  She told this story about what her life was like after her son was 
killed, after Shane was killed. She said that first she just didn't 
want to leave the house ever. She didn't want to see anybody. She would 
always walk down the street to the corner bodega to pick up groceries. 
I think it was only a block or so away. She came to driving there so 
there was no chance that she would have to meet people she knew along 
the way. Her life became fundamentally different. Her life ended, as 
she described it, in so many ways when her only son disappeared from 
the Earth.
  She talked about this strange habit that came to dominate some of her 
evenings. She would get up in the middle of the night and she would get 
in her car and she would drive to the site where Shane was shot. Shane 
was shot about two blocks from my house where I live in Hartford, CT. I 
drive by the site of Shane's shooting almost every day when I am going 
back to our home. She would drive to that site. She would stop her car, 
and she would turn on her high beams as if she were waiting for Shane 
to show up, as if she were waiting for him to come back. She knew he 
never was, but this became a habit.
  It just speaks to this immense, incalculable trauma that families go 
through when they lose a loved one, a trauma that you can't truly 
understand.
  In Sandy Hook, one mother adopted another curious but understandable 
habit in the years after Sandy Hook. She would, during an afternoon on 
a Saturday or a Sunday, convince herself that her son who had been 
killed in Sandy Hook was at a friend's house. She would sort of create 
this fantasy, this fiction in her mind. She would find it a little bit 
easier to go about cleaning up the house or doing laundry or playing 
with her other children if, in her mind, she could pretend just for a 
half hour or an hour that her son was safe at a friend's house. She was 
successful in contorting her mind to give her that space for that short 
period of time. It is what she needed to do.
  It is something that you never ever want to have to contemplate, 
creating these fictions in your minds to allow you to survive just for 
an hour at a time, shining bright lights on an empty space near 
downtown Hartford, thinking maybe that your son will show up. These are 
contortions of action and thinking that nobody should have to deal 
with.
  Roshawn Tate from California; Shana Lynn Williams from North 
Carolina; Stanley Taylor from Missouri; Ty'Reece Thomas from 
Mississippi; Tyrone Brown from Ohio; Tyrone Gregory from Ohio; Anthony 
Collins from Georgia; Anthony Milian from Indiana; Antoine Jamil 
Johnson from Missouri; Brad Rumfield from Texas; Brittany Dawn Scruggs 
from Texas; Bryan Fundora, Kentucky; Carlesa Taylor, Michigan; Curtis 
Smith, Oregon; Dae'Vion Pullum, Indiana; Detraio Deshawn Whorton, 
Alabama; Enelrae Collier Rubenstahl, North Carolina; James Delgiorno, 
Florida; Jessica Morehouse, Missouri; Jordan Reen, New York; Joseph 
Marwan Brown, Michigan; Jovanne Hollman, California; Kevin Neal, 
Georgia; Kimberly Marcum, Ohio; Lentavius Cortez Hall, Louisiana; 
Leonne Kellam, Delaware; Lovelle Laramore, New Jersey; Luis Rafael 
Lopez, Arizona; Michael Vines, Michigan.
  I apologize if I am mispronouncing some of these names. I am seeing 
many of them for the first time. But it is important for us to read 
these names into the Record so that at least they live in that space 
because the numbers aren't moving our colleagues to action.
  So far this year, just 2021, there have been 9,649 gun-related 
deaths. These include homicides and murders, accidental shootings, and 
suicides. Some people take issue with the fact that when we talk about 
the gun violence epidemic, that we are including suicides in these 
numbers. There have been thousands of suicides in the United States 
this year, but it is important that we talk about these deaths 
together.
  Again, this evening is not going to be a time to go deep into the 
question of policy change, but when you do start to explore 
interventions and causes, you will find that many of the same causes 
for homicides cause suicides as well.
  For instance, there is a very clear correlation between poverty and 
gun homicide. There is a very clear correlation between poverty and 
your risk of suicide. There is a clear correlation between the ease of 
access to a firearm and homicide as there is to suicide. In States that 
have universal background checks, there are generally lower rates of 
homicide and there are generally lower rates of suicide as well. We 
talk about suicides together.
  People are paying attention today to this epidemic because of what 
has happened in Atlanta and what has happened in Colorado. I understand 
why we pay more attention to mass shootings. There is something unique 
and frightening about large-scale, indiscriminate slaughter.
  But mass shootings are just not those incidences where 10 people die; 
there are mass shootings where 3 or 4 people are shot. That is still a 
significant crime. So far, this year, there have been 104 of those. 
There have been 104 mass shootings this year. You didn't know that, 
right? You thought there was just Atlanta and Boulder. No, not true. 
There have been 104 mass shootings.
  I believe most times mass shootings are defined as when four or more 
people are shot at the same time, not necessarily killed but shot. 
There have been 104 mass shootings this year and 191 deaths and 
injuries of children aged 11 and younger. Think about that. In this 
year alone, almost 200 kids, aged 11 and younger, have been killed and 
128 deaths and injuries of teenagers, aged 12 to 17.
  In May 2020--think about this--there were 61 mass shootings. Now, in 
May 2020, we were emotionally focused on the pandemic, and we were 
focused on trying to get people well. The country was not talking about 
gun violence in the way it normally would if there were 61 mass 
shooting in 1 month. That is the highest monthly total ever tallied by 
the Gun Violence Archive, which is a nonprofit research group where a 
lot of our data and names come from. They began tracking data in 2013. 
Since they have been tracking the data, May 2020 was the highest number 
of mass shootings, but you didn't hear about it because most of those 
mass shootings were of 4 or 5 or 6 people, not of 20 or 30 or 40, and, 
honestly, many of those mass shootings were likely people of color, 
which don't get as much attention either.
  Mushab Mohamud Ali, Minnesota; Rasaan Mack, Illinois; RoCoby Rodgers, 
Missouri; Roxann Martinez, Colorado; Samuel Lee Pollard, Mississippi; 
Steve Alphonso, North Carolina; Terrance Armour, Michigan; Timothy 
Swope, Illinois; Windy Lee Higgins, Florida; Xzavior Frost, Oklahoma; 
Anne-Marie Winters Wilson, Georgia; Audrey Isham, Indiana; Cameron 
Watkins, Virginia.

[[Page S1754]]

  I am not even close to the 9,649 gun-related deaths in 2021 alone.
  I am glad to be joined on the floor by my colleague Senator 
Klobuchar, to whom I will yield in a moment. I want to thank her for 
being a real steadfast partner in these efforts and, in particular, on 
focusing, as she has, on the crime of domestic violence.
  Senator Klobuchar, earlier this evening, I was describing a murder in 
New Haven, CT, that happened on the same day as Colorado's, in which a 
young woman was sitting in a car with her boyfriend and with her 1-
year-old in the backseat. They were in an argument, and she was trying 
to leave him, and she shot him while in the car with the child in the 
backseat. I was talking about how little attention that got in 
Connecticut, never mind in the country, in how we pay attention to 
these mass shootings--and for good reason--and how every one of these 
individuals has a story attached to them. She was someone her friends 
relied on for counsel and for moral support, and it is how that death 
initiates so many other traumas.
  I was honored to be able to read her name into the Record tonight. 
She is one of many who will now find their names in the Congressional 
Record so that, at the very least, the Record of our proceedings will 
remember her life and think about what could have been had we not been 
so cavalier with her life and her safety through our inaction.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Minnesota.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Senator Murphy so much for 
those beautiful words.
  When you honor the victims as you did, you honor all victims. What I 
have found about these crimes, particularly the crime of domestic 
violence, is, so often, the victims have been hidden from view. It is a 
crime that takes place in someone's bedroom with the door closed. It is 
a crime that takes place in a house, a crime that no one ever sees. As 
you know, in a situation like this, when there is a gun, it becomes 
deadly.
  One of my memories is of years ago when a police officer in a small 
town in Minnesota responded to a domestic violence call. What a lot of 
people don't know is that, oftentimes, those are the most dangerous 
calls police officers take. It was a victim--very young--who had called 
the police, and it was of someone who had severe mental illness 
problems, her boyfriend. The police went to the door, and the door was 
answered, and the guy shot the police officer. He was wearing a 
bulletproof vest, but he shot him in the head. I was at that funeral.
  It is a reminder that the crime of domestic violence isn't just about 
one victim; it is about an entire community.
  As the widow walked down the aisle of the church, she had her two 
little boys with her, and she was holding this little girl in a dress 
that was covered in stars. The last time that family had been in that 
church was for the Nativity play that the boys had been in. The dad had 
been sitting proudly in the front row, and now they were at his 
funeral. That is what we are talking about with gun violence.
  I join my colleagues on the floor to honor Americans whose lives were 
cruelly and unjustly taken from us by gun violence, and I am going to 
read some names of people who should never be forgotten.
  In Alabama, Chase Green; in Arizona, Isaias Garcia Tovar, Sr., Isaias 
Tovar, Jr., and Delia Noriega; in Connecticut, Dwaneia Turner; in 
Delaware, Demier Chambers; in Florida, Earnest Lee ``Bug'' Riggs, Jr.; 
in Illinois, Brenda Poss-Barnes, Greg Barnes, Sr., and Daniel Kinney; 
in Indiana, Chanel Neal; in Kentucky, Kenya Renee Cunningham, Demontray 
Rhodes, and Katherine Bryan; in Missouri, Johnnie Jones; in Ohio, 
Alonzo Lewis; in Tennessee, Kevin Niyibizi; in Virginia, Eddie Jenkins; 
in Wisconsin, Kevin Kloth and Kevin Schneider.
  Those are just 20 names out of the thousands of people lost to gun 
violence every year--an average of 100 gun violence deaths each day. 
That is three classrooms of children.
  We also know the communities where mass shootings occur will never be 
the same. Atlanta, GA, and Boulder, CO, are now part of the ever 
growing list of cities and towns forever altered but never forgotten--
Midland, Odessa, Dayton, El Paso, Virginia Beach, Pittsburgh, Parkland, 
Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, Newtown, to name a few--and I am 
greatly saddened that my home State of Minnesota also has communities 
on that list. On average, someone is killed with a gun every 21 hours 
in my State. That is 422 people each year.
  Tonight, I am going to focus on the loss of two women from Minnesota, 
both of whom were healthcare workers and both of whom were moms. For 
the past year, frontline healthcare workers protected us from the 
pandemic, but for Lindsay Overbay and Bao Yang, we failed to protect 
them.
  In February, Lindsay was killed in a horrible shooting at the Allina 
Health Clinic in Buffalo, MN, where four of her coworkers were also 
injured. This just happened last month. She was a medical assistant at 
the clinic, and she devoted her life to healing others. She had a 
wonderful laugh that would make a room spark to life. Her husband said 
that her laugh was so distinctive that, if you walked into the clinic 
and you heard her laughing, you knew exactly who it was.
  The spark of her own life was her family--her husband of 10 years and 
he beloved children, an 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl. Friends 
said that she lived and breathed her kids and that she cherished every 
moment spent with them. Her field of cardiology put her in contact with 
older patients whom she loved caring for because she said, ``They are 
at an age where they say what they are thinking.'' It is gut-wrenching 
and heartbreaking to think that Lindsay won't get to that age, won't 
get that happy freedom, won't get to see her two children grow up and 
graduate and have families of their own.

  It has been reported that the shooter, whom some described as being a 
disgruntled patient, had previously made threats against the clinic.
  Although we don't know whether this tragedy could have been 
prevented, in some way, we know it could have been. We should be doing 
more to encourage States to pass commonsense laws and to pass laws 
right here in this body that allow family members or law enforcement to 
get a court order to temporarily prevent a person from buying a gun who 
is in crisis.
  By the way--and Senator Murphy knows this--after Parkland, I was in 
the White House when Donald Trump was President. I was seated across 
from him, and I was seated next to former Vice President Pence. I was 
there because of the domestic violence bill that I lead, and I still 
have the piece of paper on which I wrote the hashtags when Donald Trump 
said that he was for universal background checks not once, not twice, 
not three times, but multiple times. When we talked about this very 
issue--the idea of getting a court order to temporarily prevent a 
person who is in crisis from buying a gun, which is something that Vice 
President Pence supported because of what had happened in Indiana, and 
they had a similar law--President Trump said he was for it, that he was 
for this stuff.
  Then what happened? We all know this. The next day or 2 days later, 
after this meeting that we had that was on TV, he met with the NRA, and 
he backed down. We can't keep backing down, and we know we now have a 
President in Joe Biden who will not back down.
  Here is another story.
  Just days ago, we lost another mother of two, Ms. Bao Yang of St. 
Paul, MN. She worked hard to raise her sons, ages 21 and 11, as a 
single mom. She held multiple jobs while she studied to be a nurse--
graduating and getting her license a few years ago.
  According to her son, ``all she ever wanted was to raise my little 
brother in the best life she could give him. I could see how much 
stress she carried every day but still always managed to provide for'' 
us.
  Bao's sister said she was a sweet, loving, caring, hard-working 
person who only wanted the best for everyone.
  But a few days ago--right around the time as what happened in 
Atlanta; these stories are both completely fresh; they just happened--
on Saturday morning at 8:30, the police were called to her house, and 
they found that she had been shot. She died later that

[[Page S1755]]

morning. According to her family, she was a victim of domestic 
violence, turned deadly because of a gun. Her killer was her former 
boyfriend.
  Unfortunately, her story is far too common. According to the 
Department of Justice, nearly half of the women who are killed by 
intimate partners are killed by current or former dating partners.
  Violence Free Minnesota, which is a statewide coalition of 
organizations that provides services to victims of domestic abuse, said 
of her homicide that she was the eighth Minnesotan to die due to 
domestic violence this year. There were 29 domestic violence-related 
deaths in Minnesota last year. Yet Federal law does not prohibit 
abusive dating partners or convicted stalkers from buying a gun, which 
is a problem I have been trying to fix since I got to Washington.
  We had hearings on this bill. We had a hearing in the Judiciary 
Committee years ago where the Republican witnesses agreed that we 
should close what is called the ``boyfriend loophole.'' As one of the 
conservative sheriffs from Wisconsin testified, he said that, 
basically, mean boyfriends shoot just as hard and hit just as hard as 
mean husbands. Yet that discrepancy exists in a number of States.
  And what just happened just a few weeks ago? The Violence Against 
Women Act passed in the House of Representatives, Senator Murphy. It 
passed in the House of Representatives with 29 Republican votes, and 
that provision is in there. That is now coming over to the U.S. Senate, 
and it has been one of the reasons this bill has been stalled out.
  I do not know how after what we have seen with the numbers of 
domestic violence cases, after the story I just told of a woman we just 
lost this weekend, and how after what happened in Atlanta, we cannot 
acknowledge this violence against women and, in particular, against 
women of color. This is one thing that we can do right now. We 
literally can pass that bill as we work on background checks and all of 
the other things that we need to do.
  I will end with this, Senator Murphy, that what happened in your 
State with the Sandy Hook shooting is forever etched in all of our 
minds and memories. When people ask, ``What was your best day in the 
Senate?'' I talk about a bill I passed--maybe little known to some--
involving a young girl who was killed as a result of a swimming pool 
tragedy. We fixed that rule about pools at least a few years ago, and 
no one has died since.
  Then they ask about my saddest day. For me, it was when the 
bipartisan background check went down, because those parents whom 
Senator Murphy knows so well were in my office, and I was one of the 
several Senators who had to tell them ``no'' even though they had had 
the courage to come before the Senate. In particular, one woman told me 
that story of waiting in the firehouse, waiting as, one by one, the 
kids would come in, and, pretty soon, they knew that they would never 
see their little boy again.
  And as she just broke down crying, remembering the last thing she had 
seen him do, which was point to the picture of the school aide on their 
refrigerator, and as she sat there, crumpled on the floor, crying, she 
thought of that aide and thought: She will never leave his side. And 
when they found them, shot in the school, that woman had her arms 
around that little boy, and they were both shot to death.
  And we all had to look at those families and say: You had the courage 
to come forward to fight for a bill that wouldn't have even prevented 
the killing of children, but you knew it was the best thing to prevent 
violence around the country, and that was background checks, but the 
Senate did not have the courage to pass it. That time has come. The 
courage must be in all of us, and we must get this done.
  Thank you, Senator Murphy.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise, as my colleagues have tonight, to 
talk about gun violence again. It seems that only a few months pass, 
and we are here over and over again, talking about this uniquely 
American problem.
  Tonight, we gather in grief--a lot of sadness throughout the country, 
people offering, as I do tonight, once again, condolences to the 
families in both the State of Georgia, the State of Colorado, and so 
many others--so many other families throughout the country who have 
lost a loved one just in the last week or month or within the last 
year.
  But we also, I think, tonight have to do more than just offer 
condolences and offer support for the families. We have to ask 
ourselves some basic questions, and one question that keeps coming back 
every time we gather--at least for me it does and, I know, probably for 
a lot of Americans--is not simply why are we not beginning to solve 
this problem, why aren't we taking action. They are obvious questions 
we all ask. But one question that keeps coming to me over and over 
again is a simple question about the U.S. Senate: Will the U.S. Senate, 
once again, as it has now we can say year after year--will the U.S. 
Senate surrender to gun violence?
  That is a question I have been asking myself. I have certainly asked 
it on this floor. Will the Senate continue to surrender to gun 
violence? And, by extension, therefore, the country is not taking 
action when we don't take action. The only way that we can begin to 
solve this problem over time is to take action here in the Senate.
  The House has acted over and over again, as we know, bill after bill. 
In a larger sense, we have to ask ourselves: Is it really true? Will it 
be true again that the most powerful Nation on Earth--really, the most 
powerful Nation in the history of the human race--will that Nation once 
again surrender to this problem because of inaction here?
  I know this is true in every State in the Union, but I certainly know 
it is true in Pennsylvania: The people of my home State and the people 
of America expect us to act. They don't expect us to surrender once 
again to this problem. They expect us to take action to pass 
commonsense gun measures that will, at a minimum, reduce the likelihood 
that we will have more mass shootings like we have experienced just in 
the last week and over and over again over months and now years. And 
even--even now we are moving into decades of mass casualty events 
involving guns.
  So they expect us to act, not to genuflect to the gun lobby. And 
tonight we have to ask that question again: Will the U.S. Senate 
surrender to this problem and, really, by implication, surrender and 
genuflect to the gun lobby?
  Tonight, I know that my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Murphy, 
and others have read through some names of victims of gun violence, and 
I will add to that list. It is about 20. Just--just a fraction, a tiny 
fraction, of those we lost just in the last couple of years from so 
many different States:
  Kortlin Williams from the State of Missouri; Marcus Obrian Young from 
the State of North Carolina; Marquez Warden from Virginia; Marvin Scott 
from Maryland; Melvin Porter from Georgia; Omar Mohamed Juma from 
Texas; Russell Jones, also from Texas; Saveon Th'Marcus Washington from 
the State of Alabama; Angela Thompson from Oklahoma; Stephanie Lee from 
Ohio; Tahjier Lafleur from California; Teon Burwell from Virginia; 
Xavier Cancer from South Carolina; Brenda Sue Strawser Sines, Maryland; 
Tera'Lynn Cantrell from Arkansas; Teshundra Fortune from Mississippi; 
Quindarious Ford from Georgia; Raemel Richardson from Louisiana; Sarah 
Larocca from Colorado; and, finally, Andre Odom from Ohio.
  I am not sure it is possible for any one of us who hasn't been--whose 
family has not been a victim of gun violence to in any way not only 
understand but even to offer the appropriate words that we try to offer 
to these families on a night like this and on so many other days and 
nights.
  I always turn back to the words of others about what this might mean 
to those families. I just can't even imagine what it would be like to 
lose a family member to gun violence or to any violence, for that 
matter.
  Remember the words of the great recording artist Bruce Springsteen. 
He wrote a song in the aftermath--the horror of the aftermath of 9/11, 
and he was trying to capture in a series of songs that he wrote and put 
in an album at the time capturing the loss, the pain, the pain of the 
loss that so many American families felt at that

[[Page S1756]]

time. And I always thought it was applicable, that kind of loss, to 
what these families feel when a member of their family is killed by gun 
violence.
  Springsteen's refrain in that song--the name of the song is ``You're 
Missing,'' and he keeps using that refrain:

       You're missing when I shut out the lights.
       You're missing when I close my eyes.
       You're missing when I see the sunrise.

  That is the reality for these families. Every moment of their day 
will be a time when they will be missing that family member for God 
only knows how long.
  So we are thinking of those families tonight who have loved and lost.
  We are also remembering--and this is another area where we have not 
taken action--we are also remembering families that had a member of 
their family become a victim of gun violence, but they survived, but 
their life is changed unalterably. The life of that individual has 
changed. The life of his or her family changes and so many burdens they 
have to carry, having survived gun violence.
  We know that 100 are killed each day--more than 40,000 across the 
country in our country. But we also know numbers about those who have 
survived: 230 people sustain a nonfatal gun injury every day, and it is 
estimated that about 10 million Americans have been shot and injured 
during their lifetime--10 million Americans.
  We also know that gun violence injuries are more likely to occur in 
younger people. Each year, approximately 15,600 children and teenagers 
are shot and injured. Black children and teenagers are 14 times more 
likely than their White peers to die by gun homicide.
  Those who survive--those huge numbers who survive--have their lives 
changed forever. The role that that victim plays in the family is made 
exponentially more different.
  I will talk about one of those individuals tonight. His name is Azir 
Harris.
  Azir Harris was 17 years old in February of 2018--February 15, to be 
exact. It was the day after the Parkland shooting in Florida. Azir was 
shot five times on his way to grab something to eat with two of his 
friends in South Philadelphia.
  He was paralyzed from the waist down, caught in the crossfire of gun 
violence as an innocent bystander. Azir's life and his family's lives 
were turned upside down in seconds. Their house was just blocks away 
from where he almost lost his life--again, as I said, shot five times.
  To navigate their two-story home, Azir's father would carry him up 
and down the stairs in their home. They searched desperately to 
relocate but were having trouble finding housing, which is often nearly 
impossible for victims of gun violence.
  The family was eventually able to relocate into a home in North 
Philadelphia, but in the process, they were forced to leave behind some 
of their adult children in the old home they came from.
  Azir continues to learn about how to navigate his new life in a 
wheelchair, and the family continues to struggle to find ways to 
improve his quality of life.
  Now they are searching for housing outside of the city so they might 
be able to find a home with a backyard for Azir to enjoy.
  Azir and his family will never be able to forget about this 
shooting--and he was shot five times--because they live with the 
consequences of that violence every single day. They are just one of 
millions who struggle financially, who struggle physically, who 
struggle emotionally because of the trauma of gun violence that has 
ravaged our communities, our schools, our churches, and our businesses.
  So the U.S. Senate has an obligation on this part of the problem as 
well. We can't surrender to gun violence, and we can't surrender to the 
question of what we are going to do to help those who survive.
  We certainly have to pass commonsense gun measures, as I mentioned 
before--something as simple and as overwhelmingly popular as universal 
background checks. And at the same time, we can pass a number of other 
commonsense measures, including a bill that I am leading here in the 
Senate and paired up with U.S. Representative Dwight Evans in the 
House, a great leader in our State from the city of Philadelphia. This 
bill is the Resources for Victims of Gun Violence, and Dwight Evans and 
I are working to get it passed.
  The bill would create an interagency advisory council with experts 
from Federal Agencies, victims of gun violence, and victim assistance 
professionals. Among other things, this council would make it easier 
for victims of gun violence to access resources by assessing, 
gathering, and disseminating information about different benefits and 
programs that could assist the victims--the victims of gun violence, 
like Azir and his family.
  But I come back to where I started as I conclude my remarks. We have 
to ask that question: Will the U.S. Senate once again surrender to gun 
violence, do nothing about the tragic loss of life that we have seen 
just in the last week, surrender to the carnage that we see not just 
this week and last week and month after month but now literally decade 
after decade?
  There hasn't been on the floor of the U.S. Senate a significant, 
substantial debate on gun violence in I don't know how long; I guess 
since maybe 2013--8 years. There has been 8 years of virtually no 
debate and 8 years of not voting, not even passing a vote on these 
commonsense gun measures, because the gun lobby has created a blockade. 
So the Senate was not even permitted, I guess, under their rules--the 
rules of the gun lobby and the rules of the majority until recently--
prohibited from even debating, let alone voting on commonsense 
measures.

  So while the victims of gun violence are burdened by all the changes 
in their lives and the expense and the trauma they live through, while 
others suffer through the consequence of losing a loved one and feeling 
that sense of missing someone every day, while all that is happening, 
the U.S. Senate has been frozen in place for 8 years at least. We 
haven't even voted on commonsense measures.
  It is time for the Senate to act, not to genuflect to the gun lobby 
like so many in this Chamber seem to want to do year after year. It is 
time for the Senate to act, to pass commonsense gun reform at long 
last.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Casey for his 
very powerful remarks and all of my colleagues for coming to the floor 
tonight in this event that Senator Murphy and I are helping to lead.
  Now I recognize Senator Van Hollen of Maryland, a great friend and 
colleague who knows a lot about this topic.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Maryland.
  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Blumenthal, 
Senator Murphy, and everybody who has been brought together by this 
tragedy that we witnessed in our country--first a few days ago in 
Atlanta and then Boulder.
  The tragedy is that these are not isolated events; these are the 
kinds of tragedies we see all too often and, indeed, every day in 
neighborhoods and streets around our country. So it is important that 
we come together to talk about the horror of the daily toll of gun 
violence and also highlight the horror of the fact that this body and 
the Federal Government have not taken action to stop those daily 
horrors.
  Mr. President, I want to begin by joining my colleagues in reading 
out loud the names of 20 of our fellow Americans who have perished from 
gun violence just this year, 15 from across the country and 5 from my 
home State of Maryland. This is just this year, and this is just a few 
of those who have been shot down through gun violence: Caleb Day of 
Ohio, age 19; Cody Nichols Campbell of Indiana, age 27; Alex Jackson of 
New Mexico, age 15; Gregory Dewayne Lynn Chandler of Texas, age 32; 
Debra Derrick of New Jersey, age 63; Jason B. West, of North Carolina, 
age 36; Jeremiah Lowery of Louisiana, age 17; Caleb Martin of South 
Carolina, age 18; Lavontae Sharron Johnson of Virginia, age 23; Holly 
Elizabeth Beard Montana of Alabama, March 11, 2021, age 51; Jessica 
Ruiz of Texas, age 20; Najeebat Sule of Pennsylvania, age 24; Ricardo 
M. Lopez of New York, age 37; Richard Douglas Sloane of Kentucky, age 
33; and Tyree Riley of Indiana, age 18.
  In Maryland, my State of Maryland, just this year: April Renee 
Lawson, age

[[Page S1757]]

18; Genesis Garrett, age 22; Terry Williams, age 18; Ken Gerstley, age 
50; and Guy Thomas, age 52.
  We read these names tonight and remember these lives because it is 
important to pay tribute to those whom we have lost, but it is also to 
make sure that tonight is not the end of their story and that we 
dedicate ourselves to turning words into action here in the Senate.
  Our country is now experiencing an upswing in gun violence, the 
largest increase in gun violence since 1960. Between the years 2019 and 
2020, we have seen that big jump, and it should horrify everyone and 
give us pause and cause us to reflect.
  I have been texting back and forth in the last few days after the 
shootings in Atlanta and Boulder with a friend of mine whom I first met 
two decades ago. Her name is Carole Price. I met her under the most 
tragic of circumstances. Carole and her husband John lost their beloved 
13-year-old son John to gun violence. Their beautiful 13-year-old boy 
John went next door to play at a neighbor's house. There was a loose 
gun, and it was an accidental shooting. John died. He was 13 years old.
  Like so many other parents or loved ones of victims of shooting 
deaths, Carole had the courage to take her pain, take her tragedy and 
work to try to make sure that kind of pain and tragedy didn't happen to 
another family in the State of Maryland or in the country. She did what 
was within her power.

  At the time, I was in the Maryland Legislature, and she came and 
implored the Maryland Legislature to do something--something to prevent 
this kind of horrible tragedy from being experienced by other Maryland 
families, and the legislature acted. Maryland became the first State in 
the country at that time to require that guns sold in our State have 
embedded trigger locks, safety locks, so that if they were left lying 
around, it would be less likely that some 13-year-old boy or girl would 
pick it up and shoot their friend. That bill saved lives in Maryland, 
and that is because of Carole Price.
  Think of what is happening today in our country. The pandemic hit. 
What did we do? We worked to follow the advice of public health 
experts--social distance, wear masks--and we went into overdrive. We 
went into overdrive to develop a vaccine to stop the deaths. When it 
comes to the epidemic of gun violence, we see no such actions being 
taken here at the Federal level. The normal thing to do would be to do 
what the Maryland State Legislature did in response to that tragedy 
Carole Price went through--try to take some action to prevent other 
families from experiencing that tragedy.
  When Carole texted me the other day, it was just another reminder 
that the pain of losing a loved one to gun violence never goes away. In 
fact, that pain comes back again and again when we see these mass 
shootings, and it comes back and again when Carole Price reads about 
another boy or girl or another person who died from gun violence in 
their home. Again, we see it on a daily basis.
  The reason it is so important that we come together and focus on this 
is that there are some, I think, in our country who have lost the 
capacity to be surprised. I know we were all shocked and surprised 
after Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after the Pulse nightclub and the 
Mother Emanuel AME shootings, maybe the shooting in Las Vegas. We were 
shocked at some point in the past that people would indiscriminately 
take the lives of others. We were shocked at the daily toll of gun 
violence. Even if it was in a place like Baltimore or another city in 
Maryland and it didn't make the national news, it still was a shocking 
thing that somebody would just gun down a fellow human being. But now 
when we see it happen time and again, mass shootings and the daily 
toll, nobody can claim surprise. What is surprising is that, as a 
nation, we haven't summoned the will to do something about it the same 
way we have worked to summon the will to defeat the coronavirus 
pandemic.
  In 2019, 757 Marylanders died from gun violence. In fact, it has 
become so routine that by this time tomorrow, on the current 
trajectory, 2 more--2 more Marylanders will have died from gun 
violence. That is 1 State out of our 50 States. This is something that 
tears at the fabric of communities in our country. It has had a 
disproportionate impact and pain on communities of color.
  I want to tell my colleagues about Denise Reid, who knows what it is 
like to carry the burden and pain of losing loved ones to gun violence. 
Denise grew up in Baltimore. She lost her uncle to gun violence. She 
lost her cousin to gun violence. She lost her cousin's girlfriend to 
gun violence. Her mother was shot standing in the doorway of their 
Baltimore home. Thankfully, she survived. In October 2006, Denise's son 
Tavon was shot and gravely wounded, paralyzed from the neck down. He 
survived his injury for 3 years but passed away after that.
  So tonight, I ask all of us to pay tribute to Denise and to her son 
Tavon Terrell Water, Sr., who was gone too soon, but I want to tell you 
about Denise because she is an inspiration to us all. She still lives 
in Baltimore. She works as the chaplain with the Baltimore City Police, 
working every day to serve her community and give back to the city she 
loves but wants to make better and safer.
  My State of Maryland has thankfully joined Denise and Carole Price 
and all those who have lost someone to gun violence by passing 
commonsense measures in our State of Maryland. But the State of 
Maryland, like every other State, is not an island. We can't do it 
alone. We need for the Congress to take action.
  If you look at guns that were used in Maryland in crimes, 54 percent 
of them come from outside of the State of Maryland, from States that do 
not have those kinds of commonsense gun laws that make people safe.
  So, Maryland, like so many other States, is calling upon our brothers 
and sisters from across the Union to help us take action, and we know 
that the public believes and understands that too. Some of my 
colleagues have said 90 percent of the American public supports basic 
background checks for people purchasing guns.
  I want to tell my colleagues about Michael Derrick Baughan, who was 
born March 18, 1983, excelled in school throughout his life. He went to 
college in Maryland, and then he moved to Delaware. His mother Cheryl 
remembers picking up the phone one day and hearing her son at other end 
of the line saying: Mom, I went to Walmart and got a gun in 15 minutes. 
I can't get a driver's license that fast, but I got a gun because I am 
feeling pain, and I have a gun to my head.
  Cheryl and Michael spoke on the phone for 2 hours before Michael 
agreed to take the bullets out of his gun. But that wasn't the last 
time he made an attempt, and Michael died of suicide, gunshot, February 
2014.
  Whether it is the ease of getting a gun to commit suicide or the ease 
of getting a gun to shoot down others, what we have in the country 
today is simply unacceptable. As Daniel Webster, who is a public health 
researcher at Johns Hopkins University of Maryland, said: Gun violence 
is not inevitable. It is very preventable.
  We know that. We know there are things we can do to prevent gun 
violence. I am not going to go into a litany of legislation that we 
could pass to make things better. I do want to point out, though, that 
we have an organization, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and 
Explosives--the ATF, as it is commonly referred to--whose job it is, 
who is charged with protecting the public from the illegal use of 
trafficking of firearms. And yet, while we give them that charge, we 
give them that responsibility, the House and the Senate, over the 
years, have tied their hands. We have handcuffed them. We made it very 
difficult for them to do their job. We prevent them from sharing trace 
crime gun data on firearms with the public and on people doing research 
into the gun violence epidemic. We bar the ATF from legally requiring 
gun dealers to keep accurate inventories of their guns and report lost 
or stolen firearms. Simple things like that that we say they can't do.
  I want to end by talking about an initiative of the mayor of 
Baltimore City, Mayor Brandon Scott, who has worked with Everytown, the 
organization, to create a cutting-edge internal system to help law 
enforcement track and understand and disrupt the stream of firearms 
entering the city of Baltimore. They have worked hard to try to

[[Page S1758]]

overcome these obstacles that we put in the way of ATF. But that is a 
challenge, and it shouldn't be so hard.
  We had a program in the city of Baltimore--still do. It is called 
Safe Streets. It is headed by a person called Dante Barksdale. He went 
by the name of ``Tater.'' He was known throughout Baltimore as the 
smiling face of Safe Streets, which was a gun violence prevention 
program.
  Dante was committed to the mission. He helped others learn to put 
down their guns. Dante was shot to death on January 17 of this year. In 
that moment, Maryland lost a son, a mentor, a hero, and as Mayor Scott 
called him, a man who saved thousands of lives in our city, thousands 
of lives, and yet his was taken by gun violence--gun violence that is 
preventable.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New Jersey
  Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, Member after Member has come down tonight 
to speak, and the conversation, as we all have come down here, was to 
come do something that I think is extraordinarily poignant.
  This is the floor where policy is debated and where ideas of 
governance are discussed. It is a deliberative body, but we are in a 
democracy, and we represent people. So, tonight, the idea was that we 
would come down here and talk about people, but the pain is that they 
are not alive; that we would discuss the deceased, the dead, the 
murdered, the killed.
  I believe that if America has not broken your heart, then you don't 
love her enough. Name after name tonight has been spoken by colleague 
after colleague, and, dear God, every single name is a son or daughter. 
It is a brother or sister. It is a family member. They are a person, 
part of a community, and they are dead.
  But this is not just any limited list. It seems to grow like a cancer 
on the soul of our country. You take my age, 51 years old. Well, in 
just the time of my life, the death in our country has been something 
like has never before been seen in even a country at war because the 
people who have died, the human beings who have been lost, the family 
members who have been slain, their total number, in just my lifetime, 
add up to more than all of the Americans who have died in every single 
war from the Revolution to our current wars in the Middle East.
  So my friends and my colleagues have read name after name after name, 
but the painful, heartbreaking reality is we could have taken hour 
after hour over days after days to name the total who have died in my 
lifetime. And the heartbreaking stories have to stagger you when you 
hear the testimony. On March 1, Kaiden Alex Peak, who was 4 years old, 
and his brother, Mayson Paul Peak, who was 3 years old, were gunned 
down, killed in Warsaw, MO. Jennifer Garcia, 21 years of age, and 
Charlie Borbon Lopez, 20 years, both killed in Portland, OR. Say their 
names. Say their names. Say their names.
  Cobe Hilliard, 19, killed in Temple, TX. April Williams, 21, and her 
mom Tammy Briggs, 46, killed in Augusta, GA. Say their names. Say their 
names.
  Christine Ruffin, age 61, was killed with a gun in Palm City, FL. 
Delquan Daniels, 23 years old, was killed with a gun in Rochester, NY. 
Say their names. Say their names.
  Gerson Aleman Velasquez, 19, was killed with a gun in Myrtle Beach, 
SC. Lionel Darling, age 39, and Rayneesha Dotson, age 30, were both 
killed with guns--killed with guns. Say their name. Say their name.
  Maritza Remijio Paniagua, age 20, was killed with a gun in Los 
Angeles. Merlyn McCallister, age 51, was killed with a gun in Chicago. 
Mishealia Marie Meredith, age 19, was killed with a gun in Eldorado, 
IL. Victor Brooks, age 20, was killed with a gun in Phoenix, AZ. Ronald 
Jeffery Laroy Jones, Jr., age 25, was killed with a gun in Columbus, 
OH. Say their names. Say their names.
  This is the question of our country. What is the quality of our 
mercy? How courageous is our empathy? How destitute is our compassion? 
How anemic is our love for one another that this many Americans are 
dying hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after 
year? Carnage in our country like never before seen in humanity, and we 
do nothing as a society and a government that was formed for a more 
perfect Union, for domestic tranquility, and for justice. At the top of 
our Federal Government's Constitution is the very ideal that we are for 
the common defense. Say their names.
  Do we honor them? Do we love their survivors? Love is not 
sentimentality. It is not words. It demands something. It necessitates 
sacrifice. And I can tell you I am one of those folks who, serving in 
an American city, would have my police officers show me the films of 
murders from our cameras--human beings being shot and killed. How could 
it not shake the core of your soul? How could it not rip open wounds 
that cannot be healed?
  My colleagues reading names of people, children lost, kids lost to 
suicide, bodies mangled, people paralyzed, how could it not call to 
your conscience? How could it not demand from all of us not to sit idly 
by and watch and witness? We are wounded as a society. We are hurting. 
There is pain that is unspoken, and that is so dangerous.
  In 2018, Shahad Smith, I knew him well. I used to live in high-rise 
projects at the top of my block. There was a group of boys there, led 
by this young man named Hassan Washington. Hassan was brilliant. He was 
funny. He had a sharp wit. He had charisma. Shahad was one of the young 
men in high school who hung out with him in the lobby of my building. I 
would come home and I would see them there.
  And I tell you, in 2018, I make it to the U.S. Senate, and I get a 
call from Jimmy Wright, a police officer from those buildings who--he 
is a beautiful man, and he was shaken. They killed Shahad on my block, 
where I live as a U.S. Senator, at the top of my block, and I will 
never forget how Jimmy described it. He said: Cory, I talked to the 
police officer. He was killed with an assault rifle. And he said: Cory, 
the police officer told me his head exploded.
  And I--I had to hold onto something because most of those kids from 
that lobby, the children I watched grow up in my 8 years living in 
those projects, in those buildings, Black boys in a world where there 
is so much assault--the first of them to die.
  In 2005, I would come home at night. I was chasing my dream to be the 
mayor of the largest city in my State. I was getting ready to run for 
office, and I came home and I smelled marijuana in the lobby.
  Now, we live in a country where it is a lot different watching kids 
at Stanford, Yale smoke pot and have no worries. But for inner city 
Black kids, I will tell you right now, they have no margins for 
experimentation. And I said to myself: Oh, I have to intervene here. So 
I started asking them: Let's get out of this lobby. Let's go do 
something. Let's go to the movies. Let's eat. And I will never forget. 
I made a mistake, y'all. I said: You guys choose a movie. That was a 
mistake because they took me to something called ``Saw II.'' Do not see 
that movie.
  And we went out to dinner at a diner, Andrew's Diner. I remember the 
conversations with them. I asked them what their dreams were. And this 
moved me because their dreams, they were humble dreams.
  And I said that I would connect them with mentors, and I had all 
these plans about how to help these young men get out of the danger 
zone. Then I got too busy with my campaign. And I remember feeling a 
little guilty that I was too busy to follow through on the commitments 
I had made. And I consoled myself that I was running for mayor: When I 
become mayor, God, I will be able to help all children in the city. I 
will step up then. Let me just get through the campaign.
  Well, I would still come home at night, and the boys weren't mad at 
me or anything like that. They would still greet me and cheer me on 
when I came into the lobby, Shahad and Hassan. It was amazing. They 
would lift me up.
  One day they had lawn signs, my lawn signs, waving them, and formed a 
parade line. And I walked out and waved and got in the elevator until I 
realized, where did they get those lawn signs from? They are kind of 
expensive.
  I ended up winning. And I had death threats on me. And when you are 
elected to office, get death threats, you have security. And next thing 
you know, I had police officers stationed in the lobby, and the boys 
weren't there anymore. They didn't want to hang out where the police 
officers were.

[[Page S1759]]

  And I didn't think too much about it because I was running at full 
speed as a new mayor. I was 36, 37 years old. The violent crime in our 
city was peaking. There were too many shooters in that hot summer. I 
will never forget. And I would run to every street corner I could where 
there was a shooting in our city. And I would stand there, and I would 
say: This is not who we are. This is not America. This is not Newark. 
We are going to overcome this. And I would give street-level sermons 
telling people about the vision for our city. And, God, we would 
eventually turn down the violence.
  But in those early days, a month into my office, I show up on a 
street corner, and there is a body covered by a sheet and another one 
being loaded on the back of an ambulance. And I barely paid attention 
to the humanity on the street. I didn't even ask for the names. I was 
too busy ministering to the living.
  I get home that night to steal a couple hours of sleep in my early 
days as mayor. And I will never forget sitting in my bedroom with my 
BlackBerry, going through it, and I saw the name on the homicide 
report. At that moment in my life, something broke in me that will 
never fix. It wasn't an anonymous name that I didn't know. It wasn't 
just a cold issuance of another crime in a big city. The name was 
Hassan Washington. Four floors below me he lived with his grandma, a 
kid I promised to help with his dreams.
  I will never forget his funeral for as long as I live. Perry's 
Funeral Home--God bless them, those professionals. I entered that 
funeral home as the newly minted mayor. And I was so upset when I saw 
it was in their basement room because going in that room was like 
descending into the bowel of a ship, a narrow staircase. And I get into 
this room. We were piled in on top of each other like we were chained 
together in grief, and people were crying. Everybody was showing up. 
Everybody was there for what is an American tradition: almost every 
day, another boy, another Black boy in a box killed by a gun.
  And I wish I could tell you that I was strong in that moment. I wish 
I could tell you that I was mayoral, that I was a leader and the father 
of a city, but I wasn't. I felt shame. I felt hurt. I felt 
embarrassment.
  I tried to lean on other people in that room. There were folk I had 
known for years, but, finally, I had enough. I had to run. I left 
there. I jumped in my SUV, drove to my new office in City Hall. And for 
the first time--not the last but for the first time as the mayor of New 
Jersey's great and largest city, I sat in that office, and I wept over 
a dead boy. And all I could think about was climbing through the 
feelings of shame and hurt and pain. All I could think about was that 
funeral in that basement room, packed full of people. All of us were 
there for his death, but where were we for his life?
  What a morbid thing we have been doing here tonight, reading the 
names of dead people killed in our country, hoping that somehow--
somehow we could change. Well, I will tell you this right now: We are 
in a distraught moment in our Nation, where most of us agree on solid 
steps. It won't solve all the problems, but it would make a difference. 
It would save a Hassan. It would save a Shahad. It would save the 3- 
and 4-year-olds, the names I have read.
  The question is, How courageous are we? How much do we truly love one 
another? What will we do? This is a moment in American history that 
could be the inflection point. If we act now, we could end some of this 
nightmare. If we fail to do anything, we will be back here again. The 
list of the dead will be longer. The heartache and the pain and the 
wounds and the grief and the sorrow and the shame will be deeper in 
America, the world's greatest country.
  We must demand of each other a greater love. We must end the poverty 
of empathy. We must free ourselves from this prison, from this dungeon. 
We must release ourselves from these chains. We must demand that this 
Nation be the Nation we want it to be, be the Nation we hope it should 
be, be the Nation that those in military uniform died for--a nation 
where we make real the greatest principles of humanity, the greatest 
calling of every faith that there is--not words, but real, true, 
manifestation of the principle and the call.
  Will we be silent? Will we be ignorant? Will we avoid? Will we do 
nothing? Will we be passive? Or will we truly be a nation that loves 
one another?
  I yield the floor
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Marcia Reitman Currie from New York; 
Mitchell Wright, Jr., from Missouri; Nicholas Tarpley from 
Pennsylvania; Reuben Lewis III from California; Rhyce Wingate-Bey, 
Maryland; Robert Crochiere, Massachusetts; Samuel Lamont Smith-
Williams, Tennessee; Spencer Wilcox, Oregon; Anthony Castillo, New 
York--we didn't come close to finishing this list tonight. We didn't 
make a dent in the list of those names of the people who have died from 
gun violence in 2021 alone, a year in which almost 10,000 people have 
died in less than 3 months in suicides and homicides and accidental 
shootings.
  It is a choice. None of this is inevitable. Almost all of it is 
preventable. It only happens here in the United States of America 
because other countries make different choices.
  Congress goes the next 2 weeks on a district work period. We wanted 
to come to the floor tonight to make clear that we are not going to 
forget those who have died through the inaction of this body, their 
national leaders; that we are going to renew our commitment to be 
better and to change and to begin that process in the wake of the 
shootings in Boulder and Atlanta by making sure that everybody hears 
the names of those who have died.
  I yield to Senator Blumenthal to wrap up for the evening.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, there is no last word tonight. There 
is no final saying here. There are no final names. Nora Beller, Tito 
Roman, Aaliyah Eubanks, Dominick Boston, Brad Keel, James Ray 
Huddelston--we could be here a long time. But the tragedy is there will 
be more names, 100 more, at this time tomorrow night.
  And every one of these names is a future cut short. Every one of them 
is a life that could have given so much, bringing more light and joy, 
pride, grace, dignity.
  My colleagues have come to the floor with great eloquence. I want to 
thank them. But the most eloquent part tonight is the names. And we 
should take inspiration from the courage of their families, the 
strength of the survivors, advocates, and activists who are forming a 
political movement that is creating ripples turning into waves that 
will overcome. They will overcome the intransigence and cowardice of 
colleagues who fail to heed the American public, and they will be held 
accountable.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered

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