Gun Violence

Floor Speech

Ms. KELLY of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, time and time again, I have come to this floor to urge my colleagues to stand with me against the rampant plague of gun violence spreading across our Nation, and I stand here again heartbroken.

I recently had the difficult and tragic duty of speaking at Tamara Sword's funeral. Tamara was the mother of five and the daughter of Chicago gun violence prevention advocate Andrew Holmes, a personal hero of mine.

Andrew is a man who has dedicated his life to preventing gun violence and supporting families of gun violence victims. For decades, he has traveled to hundreds of crime scenes to console those who lost friends and family members. In a cruel twist of fate, he was the one who needed consoling when Tamara was caught in the crossfire while at a gas station.

I wish Tamara's story was an exception, but we know it is not. It is a tragic reminder that only in America does an everyday trip to the gas station, the movie theater, or church end in gun violence or maybe you are a reporter and a photographer just doing your job or a sheriff filling your car with gas.

All across America, gun violence is surging. More than 30 cities are reeling from a summer of senseless shootings, with death tolls reaching historic levels. In Chicago last week, we marked the highest number of gun homicides in a single day in more than a decade.

After each mass shooting, Congress launches into its ritual that is used as an end run around real reform. We give our speeches; we hold our moments of silence, and then we wait for the national buzz to fade.

My colleagues seem to forget that our actions may fade, but the violence remains. Violence--gun violence--is a major public health problem in the United States. Every moment that we don't act, we risk losing even more lives to senseless gun violence, which might be homicides, suicides, or accidents.

Last week, I hosted a dinner for a group of parents who lost their children to senseless gun violence. They think we simply do not care. They wonder. There has been Newtown; there is Hadiya Pendleton; there is the church shooting, movie theaters, the mall, but still, we do nothing.

Today, I rise again on behalf of victims of gun violence. I rise to say that we can no longer dismiss the mass shootings as isolated incidents and ignore everyday shootings altogether because the fact is, when our Nation is averaging one mass shooting a day, they aren't so isolated. When shootings are so commonplace that they are called everyday shootings, they cannot be ignored.

Over the Labor Day weekend, 9 people were killed and 34 were wounded by gun violence in Chicago. It is time that we own up to the gun violence problem that is gripping our Nation and robbing us of a generation of young people one shooting at a time.

This year, for the first time in history, gun deaths are on pace to be the leading cause of death of Americans aged 15 through 24, and the suicide rate is climbing, also. The future of our Nation is hanging in the balance here.

It is time for Congress to act. There are a number of gun violence reform bills that truly make sense and that are truly bipartisan.

I urge my colleagues to stand with the American people and to take action, because the American people are on the side of gun violence reform that makes sense.

The other thing you can do is to try attending a funeral of an innocent person--of a mom of five kids, who cling onto her coffin, or of a young teen who lost his life to senseless gun violence. I wonder how you would feel then.

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