[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9170-9171]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               NOT ONE MORE TRAGEDY FOLLOWED BY INACTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Mrs. Capps) for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. CAPPS. Mr. Speaker, last Friday night, my home community was 
rocked by unspeakable violence. It left six students and their 
assailant dead and 13 others injured. Friday's rampage in Isla Vista, 
California, has touched the community in a powerful way.
  IV, as it is affectionately called, is a special place where people 
know their neighbors. Everyone is presumed to be a friend, and bikes 
are more common than cars.
  On Friday, IV joined a growing list of small communities touched by 
unspeakable violence. Today, we continue to mourn those we lost: George 
Chen, ``James'' Cheng Yuan Hong, Weihan ``David'' Wang, Katherine 
Breann Cooper, Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, and Veronika Weiss.
  We reach out to the injured who need our support as they heal, and we 
pray for the many others affected, including the families and friends 
the victims left behind. Our community grieves, and we struggle to make 
sense of the senseless.
  For many in a variety of places, this sadness and grief is also a 
frustration, frustration that more could have and should have been done 
to prevent this tragedy from the start.
  We think of other places where similar rampages have occurred so 
recently: Tucson, Carson City, Seal Beach, Atlanta, Oakland, Seattle, 
Aurora, Oak Creek, Minneapolis, Newtown, Washington Navy Yard, Santa 
Monica, Fort Hood.
  How many more of these mass shootings do we need before we act?
  We have all seen how a violent incident can bring public attention to 
the need for sensible gun safety measures. We know that we must keep 
these weapons out of the hands of violent individuals; but all too 
quickly, the attention fades, the drumbeat quiets, and we are left with 
inaction.
  I sincerely hope that this time will be different, but it won't be 
unless we, as Congress, act.
  The American public wants universal background checks. They want 
limits on high-capacity magazines, increased school safety, and 
stronger gun-trafficking penalties, and that is the least we can do. We 
also need to make sure that our systems talk to each other, so that no 
one falls between the cracks.
  It is clear that we need to do more to ensure that our mental health 
system and our law enforcement can work together to identify 
potentially dangerous individuals.
  We need to ensure that parents who are concerned that their son might 
be a danger to himself or others have a meaningful way to seek help, 
and we need to ensure that we use the many new tools available, 
including social media, so when threats are made on the Internet they 
are taken seriously.
  The American public's message to Congress is clear, and I heard it so

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poignantly at the University of California Santa Barbara just 2 days 
ago: not one more, not one more life should be lost, not one more 
family should have to grieve like ours, not one more community should 
be added to this list.
  Gun safety and the Second Amendment are not mutually exclusive. Law-
abiding Americans have the right to own a gun, but each of us deserves 
to feel safe in our homes and our communities.
  Over the next few weeks, I will be meeting with local and national 
advocates on these issues to identify the gaps and to propose ways we 
can fix them, but no matter how much bills are researched, supported, 
and proposed, we need our House leadership to commit to us, to commit 
to the American people that we will have a vote.
  Bills may pass, they may fail, but the American people have the right 
to know where their elected Representatives stand.
  I join in the chorus of those who are rightly frustrated with the 
system and with this Congress: not one more.
  I implore my colleagues to make sure that this phrase has yet another 
meeting: not one more tragedy followed by inaction. This time can be 
different, and it is up to us.

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