[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 57 (Friday, March 26, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E300-E301]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     MOURNING THE CONTINUED LOSS OF LIFE IN AMERICA TO GUN VIOLENCE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. HALEY M. STEVENS

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, March 26, 2021

  Ms. STEVENS. Madam Speaker, I rise today in response to the 
exceptional number of lives that have been stolen from American 
communities just this month to the continued scourge of gun violence in 
this country.
  On March 16th in Georgia, a gunman went on a deadly rampage at three 
spas in the Atlanta area, murdering eight people. Six of the precious 
lives lost were women of Asian descent: mothers, sisters, and partners.
  On March 20th in Pennsylvania, a gunman opened fire at a party in 
Philadelphia, killing one and wounding five others.
  And on March 22nd in Colorado, a gunman took ten innocent souls at a 
grocery store in Boulder--one of which was a police officer who arrived 
to help.
  I fear that many have grown numb to the news of violence, death, and 
dreams unrealized in this country, and to those I plead: see your 
neighbor as yourself. Protect your fellow Americans. Do not give up on 
the possibility of a future free from pain and fear of preventable 
death.
  On behalf of the victims of gun violence and their families, we 
cannot be deterred in our mission to institute basic protections to 
shield the American people from continual loss. I will not surrender to 
hopelessness, and neither should my colleagues in this legislative 
body.


[[Page E301]]


  


               Americans Are Stubbornly Unmoved by Death

                           (By Robin Givhan)

       The scene looked heartbreakingly familiar: the rumble of 
     tactical vehicles, the swarm of law enforcement officers, the 
     long ribbons of yellow police tape and the eyewitness 
     descriptions thick with residual terror. Monday evening's 
     deadly shooting in Boulder, Colo., which resulted in the 
     deaths of 10 people, including a police officer, was the 
     second mass shooting in a week.
       A dreadful normalcy has returned. Muscle memory demands 
     that we lament it--even as all evidence suggests that many of 
     us are unmoved by death. It doesn't cause behavior to change. 
     It doesn't shake people from their moorings at the center of 
     their own universe. Death is not a deterrent.
       In the days after a mass shooting, the nation mourns and 
     those who died are named. The hearts of our elected officials 
     have been broken so many times that surely they must be in 
     shards by now. The flags are lowered to half-staff. And the 
     president speaks. Joe Biden, a man who is expert at 
     consoling, did the best that he could to say something true 
     that did not sound like a cliche.
       ``I even hate to say it because we're saying it so often: 
     My heart goes out. Our hearts go out for the survivors, the--
     who had to--had to flee for their lives and who hid, 
     terrified, unsure if they would ever see their families 
     again, their friends again,'' Biden said Tuesday afternoon 
     from the State Dining Room. ``The consequences of all this 
     are deeper than I suspect we know. By that, I mean the mental 
     consequences--a feeling of--anyway, it just--we've been 
     through too many of these.''
       The images from these shootings can be gut-wrenching. In 
     video and still images, people see shellshocked survivors 
     pouring out of the school, the night club and, this time, the 
     grocery store. There's blood in these images, sometimes even 
     the blurred image of one of the deceased. There's nothing 
     sanitized about them. The shooting may happen behind closed 
     doors, but the death is in the open. The terror rises off the 
     survivors like a stench; the sound of fear reverberates.
       And still the deaths don't spur action to make the guns 
     harder to get, to make the guns less efficient. The 
     president, some politicians and many activists cry out for 
     ``common sense'' gun laws to stop the senseless death even as 
     it seems that they are pleading with a country that's engaged 
     in a completely different kind of calculation.
       Increasingly it seems that we simply do not care about the 
     other person, that other family, someone else's child. The 
     self is everything. It's freedom and liberty, whims and 
     desires. Community doesn't extend beyond one's front door. 
     Everything else is someone else's concern.
       Studies have shown that the human brain can lose the 
     capacity to process death, to absorb the meaning of it, when 
     the numbers of the dead begin to reach staggering levels. We 
     have been told that the heart can go numb in response to such 
     enormity, This is one of the explanations for why people have 
     continued to engage in risky behavior during the coronavirus 
     pandemic even as it has become ever clearer how best to 
     protect our fellow Americans. The end is on the horizon, and 
     if people simply wear a mask, social distance and persevere 
     with patience, we might get there--not all of us, sadly, but 
     most of us.
       Yet unmasked revelers crowded onto the streets of Miami 
     Beach. The very real possibility of death has not been a 
     deterrent. The community didn't matter as these partyers and 
     tourists ostensibly shot a different kind of deadly slug into 
     the Florida air.
       More than 544,000 deaths in the United States due to the 
     coronavirus have not sent everyone scurrying to protect their 
     neighbor. To follow common sense recommendations. To center 
     the community instead of the individual.
       If that number is too big for people to grapple with, what 
     is the right number? What number is small enough that each 
     death touches the heart and therefore motivates people to 
     act, to be better? Is it 58--the number of people a man 
     killed at a Las Vegas country music festival in 2017? Is it 
     49--the number killed in a shooting at Orlando's Pulse 
     nightclub in 2016? Or perhaps the motivating number is nine, 
     which accounts for those who were fatally shot in Charleston 
     during a prayer meeting. Is it eight--the number who were 
     killed in Georgia just last week? It surely can't be one 
     because there are singular deadly shootings in communities 
     all too often and still nothing happens. Nothing.
       We have not gone numb to death. To ``go numb'' suggests 
     that once there was feeling, once there was sensitivity. When 
     was that? Perhaps it was back in 1968 when, after the deaths 
     of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. 
     Kennedy, Congress passed gun laws that formed the basis of 
     federal regulation that has been regularly eroded and only 
     occasionally strengthened. We haven't cared for a long time. 
     Not when the dying were schoolchildren, people in the midst 
     of prayer or contented folks just living quiet lives.


                      Harris's self-evident truth

       Crowds gather in the street while a speaker blasts music an 
     hour past curfew in Miami Beach on Sunday. (Daniel A. Varela/
     Miami Herald/AP)
       Today, some in this country argue against gun laws with a 
     ferocity that moves beyond a right to hunt rabbits, or defend 
     oneself against an assailant or one's property in the face of 
     an intruder. We refuse to relinquish the delusion that 21st-
     century America is a frontier town in which gunplay is a form 
     of justice.
       Many insist that the very real possibility of mass deaths 
     does not outweigh a personal inconvenience or the setting 
     aside of a myth. Give up large-capacity magazines. Wear a 
     mask. These deaths matter.
       We are not numb to death. We stubbornly, selfishly dismiss 
     it. We shake it off. But there is always an assault that has 
     the capacity to bring an individual low. Some bracing gut 
     punch that stings and startles. The pain might finally 
     register in a way that is deep and lasting. And that person 
     begins to feel something. But that may require death coming 
     directly to their own doorstep, since that's the only one 
     that, for many of us, seems to matter.
       Correction: A previous version of this article misstated 
     the year of the shooting at a Las Vegas country music 
     festival. It was in 2017, not 2018.

                          ____________________