[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 17651-17653]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     NATIONAL DEBATE ON GUN CONTROL

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, because of the attack against 
Congresswoman Giffords, there has been some legislation introduced for 
more gun control. We are going to have to take a good look at that 
piece of legislation, as we have unanimously passed legislation after 
the tragic shooting in Virginia Tech in April of 2007. I am not going 
to deal directly with that specific piece of legislation, but I wish 
talk about some of the general approaches to gun control that are being 
discussed.
  Getting back to Virginia Tech, the national debate surrounding 
updating Federal gun laws gained national attention following the 
tragic shooting at Virginia Tech and now, of course, has come up again 
because of the attack against Congresswoman Giffords.
  Following the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech, Congress passed the 
National Instant Criminal Background

[[Page 17652]]

Check System. That goes by the acronym of NICS, N-I-C-S, so I will be 
referring to the national instant criminal background check by that 
acronym.
  This bill, as I said, passed the House and the Senate by unanimous 
consent and was signed into law by President Bush. Despite the strong 
bipartisan support the NICS Improvement Act had, the improvement act 
was not a perfect piece of legislation and is a good example of why we 
need to be very careful when we legislate to avoid unintended 
consequences. So I am raising some of these issues in regard to the 
possible consideration of legislation that has been introduced because 
of the terrible attack on Congresswoman Giffords.
  For example, in the next bill it actually--with unintended 
consequences but still doing it--stripped thousands of veterans and 
their beneficiaries of their second amendment rights simply because 
they had a fiduciary appointed on their behalf. Oftentimes, a fiduciary 
is appointed simply for managing disability compensation pensions or 
survivor benefits.
  Under an interpretation by the Department of Veterans' 
Administration, veterans who have a fiduciary appointed are often 
deemed ``mentally defective,'' and are then consequently reported to 
the FBI's NIC system and consequently prohibited from purchasing a 
firearm.
  Under the NICS Improvement Act--and that was a bipartisan bill--with 
unintended consequences, this happened: Around 114,000 veterans and 
their beneficiaries have been automatically denied their second 
amendment rights.
  It is a terrible irony that veterans, who have served their country 
on the battlefield, who have been entrusted with our national security 
and have been provided firearms by their very government, are the same 
people the NICS Improvement Act harmed by taking away their second 
amendment rights, all without a hearing or formal adjudication.
  We honored and celebrated Veterans Day last Friday. Yet, we are 
possibly going to be debating new legislation to restrict the second 
amendment rights of citizens without fixing the unintended consequences 
of our last major gun law, the NICS Improvement Act.
  While the horrific events in Tucson are still fresh in our memories, 
as we discuss new gun control laws we also need to move forward on 
bipartisan legislation, such as the Veterans Second Amendment 
Protection Act, introduced by a bipartisan couple, Senator Burr and 
Senator Webb. This bill would fix the unintended consequences to 
thousands of veterans caused by the NICS Improvement Act.
  A hearing we had this week offered me an opportunity to discuss 
illegal firearms tracking and the government's efforts to stop it. At 
the forefront of this is the Department of Justice's failed operation 
called Fast and Furious, where the ATF knowingly allowed illegal 
purchasers to buy guns. The more we learned about Fast and Furious, the 
more we have discovered that senior Justice Department officials knew 
or should have known about these nearly 2,000 guns ending up in the 
hands of criminals, including the drug cartels in Mexico.
  At the first House oversight hearing on Operation Fast and Furious, 
multiple ATF agents testified that fear spread through the Phoenix 
field division every time there was news of a major shooting event. So 
that brings us back to the tragedy for Congresswoman Giffords.
  Specifically with regard to the Congresswoman's shooting one agent 
said:

       There was a state of panic, like, . . . let's hope this is 
     not a weapon from that case.

  And ``that case'' was the Fast and Furious case, where our government 
decided to encourage licensed gun dealers to illegally sell guns to 
straw purchasers with the idea that we would follow them across the 
border. But there wasn't any following. So it was an effort doomed to 
failure in the first place. The Fast and Furious operation was failed 
in concept, in design, and in execution.
  As the Attorney General said last week, before our Judiciary 
Committee: It should never have happened. And the Justice Department 
officials who knew about this program, including those who allowed 
false statements to Congress, need to be held accountable.
  I thought it was fitting that late last week, Attorney General Holder 
finally wrote to the family of Agent Terry, the person who was murdered 
with two of these Fast and Furious guns found at the murder scene. This 
is the very same Attorney General who had an opportunity to apologize 
to the Terry family when he was asked by Senator Cornyn, Have you 
apologized to the Terry family? The Attorney General said, No. He said, 
Would you like to apologize now? That is what Senator Cornyn asked him. 
He gave an answer, but it wasn't an apology. So we have a letter late 
last week going to the Terry family. In his letter, he stated he was 
sorry for their loss, although he refused to take responsibility for 
the Department's role in Agent Terry's death.
  At the root, then, of Fast and Furious--and a lot of rhetoric 
surrounding gun control legislation--have been the gun trafficking 
statistics provided by ATF. These unclear statistics have fueled the 
debate and contributed to undertaking such a reckless operation as Fast 
and Furious.
  For example, in 2009, both President Obama and Secretary of State 
Clinton stated that 90 percent of the guns in Mexico were from the 
United States. But that statistic later changed to 90 percent of the 
guns that Mexico submitted for tracing to the ATF were from this 
country. This year, that number has become 70 percent of the guns 
submitted by the Mexican Government for tracing were from the United 
States. All the different percentages beg the question, what are the 
real numbers?
  Articles discussing the 70-percent number misrepresent the facts, as 
I pointed out in a letter to then-ATF Acting Director Melson in June of 
this year.
  First, there are tens of thousands of guns confiscated at crime 
scenes annually in Mexico. The Associated Press stated that in 2009, 
over 305,424 confiscated weapons were locked in vaults in Mexico. 
However, the ATF has acknowledged to my staff, in a briefing on July 
29, 2011, that ATF does not have access to the vault in Mexico 
described in that story.
  ATF also acknowledges that only a portion of the guns recovered in 
Mexico are actually submitted to the United States for tracing. In a 
November 8, 2011 court filing, the chief of ATF's firearms operation 
division made a declaration saying--now, remember, this is in a court 
filing:

       It is important to note, however, that ATF's eTrace data is 
     based only on gun trace requests actually submitted to the 
     ATF by law enforcement officials in Mexico, and not on all of 
     the guns seized in Mexico.

  That court filing further states that:

       In 2008, of the approximately 30,000 firearms that the 
     Mexican Attorney General's Office informed ATF that it had 
     seized, only 7,200, or one quarter, of those firearms were 
     submitted to ATF for tracing.

  So if Mexico submits only 25 percent of the guns for tracing, then 
the statistics could be grossly inaccurate one way or the other.
  The discrepancies in the numbers do not stop there. ATF also informed 
my staff that the eTrace-based statistics could vary drastically by a 
single word's definition.
  We have an example of different definitions. The 70-percent number 
was generated using a definition of U.S.-sourced firearms. That happens 
to include guns manufactured in the United States or imported through 
the United States. Thus, the 70-percent number does not mean that all 
guns were purchased at a U.S. gun dealer and then smuggled across the 
border; it could simply mean that the firearm was manufactured in the 
United States.
  So when my staff asked ATF, how many guns traced in 2009 and 2010 
were traced to U.S. gun dealers, the numbers were quite shocking in 
comparison to the statistics we previously heard. For 2009, of the 
21,313 guns recovered in Mexico and submitted to tracing, only 5,444 
were sourced to a U.S. gun dealer. That is around 25 percent.
  For 2010, of the 7,971 guns recovered in Mexico submitted for 
tracing, only

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2,945 were sourced to a U.S. gun dealer. That is only 37 percent, a far 
cry from 70 percent or 90 percent that we have been hearing over a long 
period of time, not to mention that the guns in 2009 and 2010 from gun 
dealers could include some of the nearly 2,000 firearms that were 
walked as part of our own Justice Department's Operation Fast and 
Furious.
  We need clearer data from ATF and from Mexico. Mexico needs to open 
the gun vaults and allow more guns to be traced, not just the ones the 
Mexican Government selects. We need to know if military arsenals are 
being pilfered as a source--as media articles have claimed the State 
Department points to in diplomatic cables.
  When it comes to the diplomatic cables, I sent a letter to--actually 
it was yesterday--Secretary of State Clinton seeking all diplomatic 
cables discussing the source of arms from Mexico, Central America, and 
South America. I believe this information is relevant to Congress, 
given that I discovered in a July 2010 cable, as part of my Fast and 
Furious investigation, that cable titled, ``Mexico Weapons 
Trafficking--The Blame Game,'' seeks to dispel myths about weapons 
trafficking. Among other things, the State Department authors discussed 
what they perceived as ``Myth: An Iron Highway of Weapons Flows from 
the U.S.''
  These cables are vitally important to Congress's understanding of the 
problem. Further, given that they appear in documents that ATF 
submitted to Congress as part of Fast and Furious, there should be no 
reason for the State Department to withhold them as part of our 
legitimate oversight, even if they are classified.
  There is a lot more to be said about the specific problems with the 
legislation that might be coming before the Judiciary Committee as a 
result of Congresswoman Giffords' tragedy. We have to ask a lot of 
questions to flush out some of these serious problems. We don't want to 
happen in this legislation what happened in the NICS Improvement Act 
when 114,000 veterans were denied their second-amendment rights and, 
consequently, avoid these unintended consequences. We should not be 
legislating away any constitutional rights people have under the second 
amendment.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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