[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15401]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   WE CAN BREAK THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Connecticut (Mr. Himes) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, we all awoke yesterday to a grim but familiar 
ritual. As we looked at our phones, we saw that dozens of people had 
been slaughtered in Las Vegas by a madman with a gun.
  For the victims, the survivors, and their families, this is a 
nightmare come true, and my heart goes out to them and to the first 
responders and to the many people who rushed to help in that hellish 
situation. But now what?
  The question can't be escaped, and it hits particularly hard those of 
us who live in the shadow of Sandy Hook, years ago, where 20 babies 
were killed, and we thought that that would be enough to cause this 
Congress to act--to act for sanity, to act for commonsense, to act for 
life. But it wasn't. And neither was Orlando, neither was San 
Bernardino, and now neither, I fear, will be the horrendous massacre in 
Las Vegas.
  Let's be clear that no other tragedy that we face, not terrorists 
flying into buildings, not hurricanes which render entire islands 
without power and without hope, cause us to say: This is not a time to 
address this problem.
  We ask ourselves: What can we do better? What can we learn? How can 
we stop this? Except on this issue. Orlando--Congress does nothing; 
Sandy Hook, 20 dead children--Congress does nothing; now Las Vegas.
  What is happening right now is that conversations are happening in 
offices to figure out what the decent interval of time is between the 
deaths in Las Vegas and when we can introduce a bill that will make it 
easier for people to buy silencers. Not even the near fatal attack on 
one of our own, my friend Stephen Scalise, was enough to cause us to 
seriously consider what we might do to staunch the flow of blood that 
characterizes this country, and this country alone.
  Let's be clear. Let's be very clear about what we can do and what we 
don't want to do.
  First of all, to all those who are listening to this and saying, 
``They just want to take away my guns,'' no, we do not. I and those of 
us who stand for gun safety respect the Second Amendment. Many of us 
enjoy hunting. Many of us enjoy target practice. Many of us believe 
that perhaps you are safer if you can defend yourself. We have no 
interest in taking away anybody's guns.
  We have interest in at least two things that have the virtue of being 
supported by the vast majority of Americans: universal background 
checks, the simple idea that, if you are going to exercise your Second 
Amendment rights and buy a weapon, we should check to see if you are 
violent, if you are a terrorist, if you are likely to do harm with that 
deadly weapon. That is a simple idea that has about 90 percent support 
in this country, and yet it will not be brought to this floor in what 
is known as the House of Representatives.
  Do we represent or do we not?
  There are other ideas. There has to be some limit on the firepower 
and the nature of the lethal technology that Americans can get access 
to. We saw in Las Vegas what very powerful weapons, perhaps modified to 
turn them into military-style weapons, can do to people and their 
bodies. I think most Americans would agree that there is some line--
some line--between the weapons that we should have access to as a 
result of our Second Amendment rights and to do what we need to do and 
those weapons that can wreak the kind of havoc that we saw in Las 
Vegas.
  Last year, after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub, I decided in 
desperation that I would not participate in any more moments of silence 
in this Chamber, that prayers and sympathy are fine, but this room can 
fix this problem. But this room and the people in it refuse to do so, 
even though we call ourselves Representatives, and we will not bring 
forward ideas that our constituents would support.
  So today, in our despair, we must remember that our great struggles--
suffrage, civil rights, healthcare--took decades for us to achieve. We 
can break the cycle of violence, but we have to act. We have no other 
choice.

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