[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17284-17285]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THIS HAS TO END

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Washington (Mr. McDermott) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, the Bible says that by their deeds ye 
shall know them, and this Congress should pay heed to that message.
  This week, we're mourning 20 children buried in Newtown, Connecticut.

[[Page 17285]]

The President is right when he says we've seen this too many times 
before, and it has to end.
  About this time 24 years ago I was sworn into the Congress. Two weeks 
later, five children were killed and 29 were wounded in the Stockton, 
California, schoolyard at Cleveland Elementary School.
  You would have thought that we would have acted. Bills were put in. 
It took us until 1993--4 years--to pass the assault weapon ban. 
Courageous legislators stood up and said enough is enough, but hearings 
and all went on and on and on about military-style weapons that should 
be banned.

                              {time}  1020

  Anybody knows you don't hunt with a banana clip with 30 bullets in 
it. That's not hunting. That's not what you use at a gun range. We know 
that we shouldn't be able to buy a gun if you have a record of serious 
mental illness. You would think those things that were common sense 
would become law.
  They became law in 1993, and there was a pushback from the National 
Rifle Association that said, well, all right, you can pass this, but 
with a 10-year sunset on it. Why do you put a sunset on an assault 
weapon ban? But we did. The fight was led by a courageous lawmaker who 
was willing to stand up and take the chance of having the NRA come down 
on him. His name is Pete Stark. Pete Stark led the fight in the House. 
Dianne Feinstein led the fight in the Senate. He pushed and pushed and 
pushed and put the bill in again and again and again and finally got it 
through. In a few days, he will cast his last vote in the House. I'm 
going to miss him. We need courageous legislators like that. What we 
didn't have 10 years later were courageous legislators.
  When the ban came to an end in 2004, the House was in different 
hands, politics had changed, 9/11 happened, and everybody said, What's 
the problem, we don't need this ban anymore. It's very clear that there 
are some things we can do--things like the weapon ban--but the real 
difficult part for us is to have a discussion about violence in our 
society.
  One of my old friends in Afghanistan told me you can tell a country 
by what its national game is. Ours used to be baseball. But it's hard 
to believe that baseball is our national game anymore when you look at 
Sunday Night Football and realize how we glorify violence. Go into a 
game store and look at the games that we buy for our kids at 
Christmas--games that make it possible for you to sit and kill people 
hour after hour after hour, sitting alone by a computer.
  We don't want to talk about those issues. We've managed to get some 
of the violence on television down before 8 o'clock at night when kids 
are still up, but we struggle because in a free enterprise society you 
can do anything you want. Well, we run the risk of having the 
difficulties we have here today.
  The other thing we have to think about is the whole question of how 
we deal with the mentally ill. In 1996, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act 
passed in California. It made it almost impossible to put anybody in a 
locked facility unless they were imminently going to kill somebody or 
kill themselves. ``Gravely disabled'' was the term. We made it very 
hard to deal with these kinds of cases, and privacy rules and all of 
this we've added on over time has made it even more difficult. But it 
is clear that we as a society have to face the fact that there are some 
people who need help. This mother was looking for it.
  We must act in this House.

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