[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 26-27]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   GUN VIOLENCE AND THE PATH FORWARD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, traditionally we start the new year on a 
note of hope. Notwithstanding troubled headlines and difficulties home 
and abroad, the new year is an opportunity to consider the future 
afresh, to reflect on opportunities, past accomplishments, and new 
opportunities.
  I appreciate President Obama beginning the new year with a continued 
focus on gun safety. His modest proposal was greeted with predictable 
opposition and scorn as some Republican politicians attempted to 
distort it all out of proportion and to change the subject to a 
nonissue: confiscation of the guns of law-abiding Americans when, in 
fact, virtually all responsible American gun owners support reasonable 
background checks to make it more difficult for people we all agree 
should not be armed to get guns.
  It is interesting to speculate on what would have been the response 
in today's superheated, contentious political climate with the efforts 
of a generation ago to reduce the carnage on our highways from 
unnecessary auto deaths or the hundreds of thousands of people who 
became addicted to cigarettes and died of cancer and heart disease. 
There would have been screams of outrage about the nanny state and 
political correctness, that the government was going to take cigarettes 
away from people because it knew what was best for them. It was going 
to force people to pay unconscionable levels of tax that would fall on 
the poor, that a more aggressive auto engineering program was the 
government telling the private sector and the consumer what was best 
for them, that it would drive up the cost of automobiles, and that it 
would have law enforcement interfere with people having an innocent 
drink on a night on the town.
  Most telling would have been the argument that this really wouldn't 
make any difference, that none of these steps would stop people from 
smoking or reckless driving on the roadways. People would still die.
  Those excuses for inaction are demonstrably false a generation later. 
We have cut the rates of adult smoking in half and saved millions of 
lives. The carnage on our highways has been dramatically reduced and 
American families are safer.
  It is important to have perspective going forward. Yes, there is no 
single solution to gun violence. But the fact remains that the United 
States is unique among developed countries, being unable to protect our 
families from unacceptable levels of death at the hands of the deranged 
or the careless.
  There are things we can do to make a difference, and the public is 
willing to accept them. I begin this new year hopeful that we don't 
have to accept Capitol Hill as an island of denial, whether it is the 
threat from climate change or the potential to do something about gun 
violence to make our families safer.
  Last year, there were times when we in Congress came together and 
produced some constructive results. At the State and local level, 
people are not waiting for our Republican colleagues to come to their 
senses to deal with carbon pollution or gun violence. They are taking 
action.
  I am hopeful that we will be able to broaden the conversation about 
what, in fact, we can do: tone down the rhetoric and find steps on 
issues that are both contentious and even those where there is 
basically no disagreement but we simply haven't gotten around to taking 
action.

                              {time}  1015

  There are clear opportunities for us to broaden that agenda. We can 
avert a crisis in Gaza from a lack of water and adequate sanitation. We 
could pass Representative Murphy's bipartisan

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mental health bill. We could link food and farm policy with new 
awareness and research.
  Let's not in 2016 have the opportunities for cooperation and progress 
drowned with political vitriol. Let's cooperate where we can, focus on 
solutions even where we can't, and set the stage for giving Americans 
what they deserve: a government not in denial, a Congress willing to 
cooperate and to face problems, large and small, so as to make progress 
rather than to revel in discord and hyperbole in order to win votes in 
contentious primaries. Let's focus on what we can get done and do it. 
We will feel better, and the American public will be better served.

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