[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17287-17288]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              THE SHOOTING TRAGEDY IN NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Virginia (Mr. Connolly) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CONNOLLY of Virginia. Now it's Newtown, 20 innocents and their 
six teachers. More tears, more burials, but will we heed its meaning? 
Will we break the gun lobby spell that has held us in thrall to a 
psychosis that has left us numb and paralyzed with each passing 
tragedy? I think so.
  First step in any recovery program: admit the problem. We have too 
many weapons with too much ammunition that is unregulated, unchecked, 
and unjustified. We need to restore rigorous background checks to keep 
dangerous weapons away from criminals and the mentally ill. We need to 
close the gun show loophole. We need to facilitate database sharing 
among law enforcement agencies--Federal, State, and local.
  Next step: limit access to weapons of mass killing. No hunter needs 
an Uzi; no citizen needs an assault-style weapon for self-defense. No 
other civilized society has allowed the argument that any restriction 
of any kind is a direct assault on our personal liberty, except us.
  Next: require registration and stiff penalties for failure to secure 
dangerous weapons in the home or workplace while banning their presence 
in a select number of public places such as churches, police stations, 
mental health facilities, recreation and youth centers, government 
buildings, and--oh, yes--schools.
  The gun lobby has bullied and intimidated us for too long. Reasonable 
gun control measures like those just listed provide for public safety; 
they don't threaten it. The lobby loves to fall back on trite mantras 
that unfortunately have proved all too effective in silencing any 
meaningful public debate heretofore: ``Guns don't kill; people do.'' 
``Any restriction real or imagined contravenes my Second Amendment 
rights to bear arms.''
  Oh, really?
  Even Justice Scalia, in writing his unprecedented and deeply flawed 
Heller opinion, acknowledged that it did not preclude reasonable gun 
control measures. Even Scalia has had to admit in his originalist 
interpretation of the Second Amendment he cannot answer whether the 
Constitution envisioned a universal right to possess rocket launchers, 
RPGs, stinger missiles, or military assault weapons in our homes. That 
is the logical fallacy and folly of the argument of unrestricted rights 
to bear arms without limit. Its proponents allow for no check on this 
right in the Constitution. Even the First Amendment has limitations. So 
does this one.
  We've been lulled into a passivity and fatalism with the logical 
fallacies and sometimes thuggish tactics of the gun lobby and its 
extreme right-wing allies at a terrible cost. Each year, guns kill 
almost 10 times the number of Americans lost on that tragic day in 9/
11; and each year, we face another massacre: Aurora, Tucson, Virginia 
Tech, and now Newtown.
  Time for our outrage to return us to action and reshape this gun 
culture. It is in our hands.

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