[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 98 (Wednesday, June 8, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H5338-H5339]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 GETTING GUN CRIMINALS OFF THE STREETS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Speaker, the mass shootings across our country 
cry out for solutions that work. The good news is we know what works, 
and we also know what doesn't work.
  We have been passing gun control laws for more than 50 years. The 
number of American households with firearms has dropped significantly 
in those years.
  So let me ask: Are things getting better or worse?
  We know this from decades of experience: Gun control laws are 
extremely effective at disarming law-abiding citizens. They are 
completely ineffective at disarming criminals, madmen, and terrorists. 
They create a world where law-abiding citizens are defenseless and the 
gunman is king.
  The day after the Uvalde massacre, a criminal with an AR-15-style 
rifle shot into a crowd that was gathered for a graduation party in 
Charleston, West Virginia. A woman with a concealed weapon shot him 
dead on the spot. Nobody else was hurt. Had that occurred on a school 
property or other so-called gun-free zone, the death toll could easily 
have been counted by the dozens.
  The left scoffs at the notion that only a good guy with a gun can 
stop a bad guy with a gun.
  Well, do they know of any other way?
  There is none.
  The only question is how long it will take for that good guy with a 
gun to show up. It has often been said that the police can be there in 
minutes when seconds count. And what we found time and again is that 
even when the police get there, they don't always act.
  Those who are directly threatened by a gunman are those who are in 
the best position to stop such an attack because they are there on the 
spot and their lives depend on it. And yet the left won't let them.
  We think nothing of seeing an armed guard at a bank or a shopping 
mall. They are there to protect our money and our merchandise by 
killing bad guys with guns. Yet the left goes berserk when anyone 
suggests that we do the same thing to protect our children.
  What makes the left believe gun laws will be any more effective at 
keeping

[[Page H5339]]

guns out of the hands of criminals than our drug laws have been at 
keeping drugs out of the hands of addicts?
  The difference is that drug laws don't disarm law-abiding citizens 
from defending themselves, their children, and their fellow citizens. 
Gun laws do.
  The President tells us that hardening our schools isn't the answer. 
Well, if he actually meant that, he ought to dismiss the Secret Service 
and open the front door of the White House and be sure to declare it a 
gun-free zone.
  Of course, hardening vulnerable venues like schools works. There is a 
reason why 98 percent of mass shootings occur in so-called gun-free 
zones: There is nobody there to shoot back, and the criminals know 
that. The Buffalo shooter noted precisely that in his manifesto.
  The good news is we know what works. Prosecuting gun criminals and 
putting them in prison until they are old and gray works. Yet woke 
district attorneys across the country refuse to do so. Executing 
murderers works. Yet the left has largely succeeded in all but 
abolishing the death penalty.

                              {time}  1015

  And protecting the right of responsible citizens to return fire 
works. It stops an estimated half million to 2 million crimes in this 
country every year.
  The father of modern policing, Sir Robert Peale, often observed that 
the police are simply an extension of community; that, in reality, the 
community is the police and the police are the community. Every 
citizen, he said, has a right and duty to defend themselves and to 
uphold the law. The police are there, not to replace private citizens, 
but to support them.
  So let me ask, is the surest path out of this violent chapter of our 
history the quixotic quest to get 400 million guns off the streets, or 
is it to get the criminals who use them off the streets? That is what 
we once did, before social justice replaced criminal justice.
  We prosecuted gun criminals to the fullest measure of the law. We 
executed murderers. We identified the dangerously mentally ill and 
confined them so we could treat them. These measures worked until the 
left seized control of our cities and reversed them.
  I think it is long past time to take those streets back, get the 
criminals and dangerously mentally ill off of them, and protect our 
children with the same resolve and force as we use to protect our 
money.

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