[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 8767]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        MASS SHOOTING IN ORLANDO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Danny K. Davis) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DANNY K. DAVIS of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I rise today, along with 
other Members of this body and tens of millions of Americans in every 
corner of our Nation, to express my profound sympathy and heartfelt 
condolences to the families and friends of the 49 beautiful young 
people of Orlando whose lives were stolen Sunday morning. We may never 
know the kind of hatred, what kind of sickness moves an individual so 
vehemently with such unchecked racism and homophobia to commit mass 
murder allegedly in the name of one or more terrorist causes.
  My mind constantly returns to those who lost their lives at the 
Pulse, along with the 53 who were wounded, in an attempt to understand 
how one individual came to have the power to wreak such destruction and 
havoc. These innocent souls now join those lost at Blacksburg, 
Virginia; Newtown, Connecticut; Killeen, Texas; San Ysidro, California; 
San Bernardino, California; Edmund, Oklahoma; Fort Hood, Texas; 
Binghamton, New York; and Aurora, Colorado, as victims of modern 
warfare.
  So far 2016 has seen 136 mass shootings, according to the Gun 
Violence Archive.
  How can we countenance the continued ownership, availability, and use 
of semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15? What legitimate purpose can 
they serve? What legitimate need do they fulfill? How many more must 
die before we rise up as a Nation and reinstate the ban on such weapons 
in civilian life? Would that have an impact? Would such a ban save 
lives?
  We don't have to guess. We can look to the experience of Australia, a 
nation with some significant parallels to the United States. In 1996, 
after the worst mass shooting in Australian history, then-Prime 
Minister John Howard led the battle for what was to become the National 
Firearms Agreement, which banned certain semiautomatic and self-loading 
rifles and shotguns and required all firearm license applicants to show 
a genuine reason for owning a gun, which couldn't include self-defense.
  The country instituted a mandatory federally financed gun buyback 
program, which led to the repurchase of 700,000 guns, which halved the 
number of gun-owning households and reduced the number of guns in 
circulation by about 20 percent. The firearm homicide rate fell by 59 
percent and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent without 
increases in other types of deaths. Australia hasn't had another mass 
shooting on that scale since.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to close on another even more critical note: 
addressing the deadly end result of racism, homophobia, and male 
chauvinism.
  The self-serving notion that any individual or group is superior to 
another has plagued America from our earliest days as a Nation. Slavery 
was a cancer on our people. Justified by the crudest, cruelest, most 
vicious ideology, which proclaimed persons of African or Native 
American ancestry to be inferior and subhuman and persons of European 
ancestry to be their natural masters, it was the basis of a vicious 
system of social oppression and economic exploitation. No people will 
endure such oppression and exploitation forever. Indeed, it inevitably 
led to the deadliest and most divisive war in our Nation's history: the 
Civil War. 204,070 people died in battle or from injury in battle, and 
414,152 died from disease or accident, a total of 618,000 souls.
  Yet here we have these evils lingering in our society today. They 
continue to express themselves in so many different ways.
  What kind of deranged mind leads itself to believe that it can pass 
judgment on other individuals or groups? What kind of mind raised in 
the United States places itself above our constitutional declarations 
of equality for all? What kind of mind finds the basis to declare other 
individuals or groups defective or inferior? What kind of mind declares 
other individuals unworthy or unqualified to share the protections of 
our Constitution? What kind of mind asserts they are above judgment by 
a member of another group? What kind of mind envisions a world where 
one people are superior to another people and believes that such 
notions can lead to anything other than enduring conflict, death, and 
destruction?
  Mr. Speaker, these kinds of thoughts can no longer linger. The answer 
rests, to a real degree, with us.

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