[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 19347]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    CONCEALED CARRY RECIPROCITY BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Massachusetts (Ms. Clark) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. CLARK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, next week is the fifth-year 
anniversary of the horrific shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary 
School in Newtown, Connecticut. For a brief moment, it looked like we 
would actually honor those victims by voting on a bill that would 
improve background checks to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous 
criminals, but we should never have gotten our hopes up.
  There is one winner in the House, and it is the gun lobby. The 
majority has combined the background check bill with a bill that helps 
move forward the gun lobby's ultimate agenda: gutting States' gun laws. 
This bill forces every State to accept the concealed carry laws of 
every other State, including the 12 States that don't even require a 
permit to carry a concealed weapon in public, even into a school.
  Let's take one example of the dangerousness of this bill. A woman in 
an abusive relationship is five times more likely to be killed by her 
abuser if there is a gun involved.
  Let that sink in: bringing a gun into an abusive situation means the 
chances of a woman dying increases by 500 percent.
  So it makes all the sense in the world that, if this Congress were 
interested in public safety, saving lives, curbing gun deaths, that we 
would be talking about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous 
people. But that is not what is happening here. We are talking about a 
bill that invites domestic abusers to buy a gun in a State with lax 
laws and legally carry that gun into any other State.
  This bill creates not only added danger for the public, but for law 
enforcement. And there is an extra kicker: this bill includes civil 
liability for police officers as they try to identify who can legally 
carry a weapon.
  The National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence 
wrote: ``The complete lack of consistent training standards, the 
different standards for identifying individuals that are too dangerous 
to carry, the uncertainty of a document's validity, and the exposure of 
agencies and police officers to civil liability create unacceptable 
risks to our Nation's 900,000 police officers and the public at 
large.''
  Read the letters from prosecutors, from attorneys general, from law 
enforcement, all warning of the dangers of this bill. Anyone with 
common sense can tell you, this is not only an abdication of our duty 
to keep Americans safe; it is an overt favor to the rich and powerful 
gun lobby. But it is no surprise because the gun lobby is the only one 
who gets a vote on these issues in Congress.
  If you are a survivor of domestic abuse fleeing across State lines to 
protect your family, you do not get a vote.
  If you are a mom whose 6-year-old was murdered in Sandy Hook, you do 
not get a vote.
  If your mother or sister was gunned down during a prayer service at 
Emanuel Church, you do not get a vote.
  If you are one of the 93 people who die from gunshots every day in 
this country, you do not get a vote.
  But if you are the gun lobby, you get a vote every single time.
  Mr. Speaker, I don't need to tell you, this isn't the kind of action 
that Americans at home are demanding. We have heard their calls. We 
have taken the meetings. We have heard their pleas for help. But 
Republicans in Congress are trying to convince us we can't even try to 
prevent another death.
  Here in this Chamber, the moments of silence have turned into decades 
of inaction. And if that inaction wasn't scandalous enough, now this 
Congress is paving the way to actually increase gun violence in States 
that have acted responsibly to decrease it and prevent it.
  Who is going to pay? Not the rich and powerful gun lobby. No. It will 
be the next innocent victim of preventable gun violence. You remember, 
that is the person you couldn't even bother to give a vote.

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