Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, last Thursday I was on the floor honoring the victims of the mass shooting in Kalamazoo, MI, another shooting spree that left six people dead and two others injured, and on that very same day another shooting spree broke out in Kansas that forever changed another town--another community in this country like the change that has overcome Sandy Hook, CT, since that fateful day in December of 2012.
This was a shooting spree in Kansas that spanned several miles in nearly 30 minutes. Three people were killed. It could have been a lot more. Fourteen were wounded. The shooting spree took place in two locations as well as the Kansas workplace.
The gunman had multiple felony convictions which prohibited him from buying a firearm, but he used his former girlfriend as a straw purchaser to buy yet another military-style semiautomatic weapon that he used in the shootings. It sounds a lot like many of the other shootings I talked about on the floor.
As has been the case, I try to come down to the floor, seemingly every week, to tell the stories of who these victims are because the numbers don't seem to be moving my colleagues--31,000 a year, 2,600 a month, and 86 a day are being killed by guns in this country. My hope is that by learning who these people are and learning the ripples of tragedy that unfold after a family member is killed by guns, that maybe that psychology and connection to the emotion of these shootings will move my colleagues to do something--anything at this point--to address this epidemic.
Brian Sadowsky was 44 years old when he was killed in the shooting. He was one of three people who were killed at their workplace, Excel Industries, in Hesston, KS. Brian was remembered by his coworkers as a very outgoing guy who was always telling jokes, always fun to be around, and had a biting sense of humor. He rabidly rooted for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He wore Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia and gear to work almost every day. He would drop whatever he was doing in order to help his friends who were in need.
A friend of Brian's remembered him as being ``a little rough around the edges'' at times, but he was the kind soul who was ``always there to help. He was a big teddy bear once you got to know him.''
His friends said he was a recovering addict who was clean and sober for many years and was instrumental in helping a lot of others overcome addiction.
Renee Benjamin was 30 years old when she was killed. Her friend remembered her by saying that ``she's smart, she's beautiful. She was dedicated to Excel. She loved that job. She loved the people. I remember the way she loved people.''
``If you ever saw someone smile from the inside out, she was an inside out person,'' one of her friends remembered.
Another friend said:
She is a person who always gave her all into whatever she did and whoever she loved. She was so smart, but shy about it. She was so funny, so beautiful, inside and out. She was my best friend. We shared everything. We shared a life. . . . All she wanted was to love and be loved.
Josh Higbee was just a year older. He was 31. People who knew Josh said he was a loving, hard-working man. He loved to fish and spend time with his fiance and his 4-year-old son. His older brother said that Josh was `` `Mr. Fix-It.' He loved tractors and toy cars, anything automotive. He was a car guy. He liked to work with his hands.''
His sister-in-law said that Josh was ``taught to be a very loving, kind man. He has a son that he adores, takes care of. . . . Josh would give you the shirt off his back and worked long, hard hours to take care of his family.''
We pay a lot of attention to these victims of mass shootings because they tend to make the news. We see them on TV, but every single day there are 86 people who are being killed by guns. A lot of them are suicides, but many of them are homicides. It is happening all across this country, and not all of them make the national news.
Andre Lamont O'Neal, Jr., died earlier this year in Louisville, KY. Andre was 8 years old and his babysitter was grilling and also had a gun in his pocket. He had slippery fingers, and when he attempted to remove the gun from his pocket, it accidentally fired. It struck Andre's arm and chest. His babysitter panicked and apparently put Andre in a car and took him to a nearby hospital, but it was too late.
Andre's father, as you can imagine, was overwhelmed. He was ``a good little boy,'' he told reporters.
A few weeks later, Nicholas Hawkins, 19 years old and from Winfield, AL, told his mother that someone was trying to kill him. That was the last time anybody heard from Nicholas. Four days later his body was found shot to death.
He left high school because of bullying and was only 2 weeks away from completing his GED. He intended to go into cosmetology or a related field. He loved to dance, sing, write music, and play guitar. He was good with hair and makeup and described as very funny, quirky, and had a bubbly personality. His friends said he often stole the show.
Every day 86 people die in this country. You don't hear about all of them because this has just kind of become the wallpaper of American news. Shootings have become routine. This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world, and I just want to finish by talking a little bit about this unfortunate, tragic American exceptionalism.
America has 4.4 percent of the world's population, but we have 42 percent of the civilian-owned guns in the world. We have 4 percent of the population, but nearly half of all of the guns are in this country. It used to be that about half of Americans own guns. Today only about one-third of Americans own guns, but a small number of Americans own a lot of weapons. There are more high-powered guns, like the one that was used in Kansas, than ever before.
Why does this matter? Well, it is because the United States also has more gun deaths than any other nation in the developed world, and it is not even close. This chart shows the figures of homicides by firearm per 1 million people. Australia, New Zealand, and Germany have less than two. Switzerland gets all the way up to 7.7. In the United States it is 29.7. There is no other country in the world that comes close to the United States when it comes to the number of homicides in this country. This isn't aggregate numbers. This is per 1 million people.
The reason I show you these two charts is that when you put it together, it tells a pretty interesting and simple story. Here is the chart correlating guns per 100,000 people and gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. Here is the line of correlation. It is a pretty simple story.
With a handful of outliers such as Argentina and Cyprus, the story is that the more guns you have in a country, the more gun homicides are going to occur. Here is the United States on the line, but it is an outlier in terms of the number of guns and the number of deaths--simply an extrapolation of a story that all of our other first world competitors could tell by themselves. This rebuts this ridiculous mythology by the gun industry, which tells us that if you have more guns, you are going to be safer. The solution in Sandy Hook was just that the Sandy Hook Elementary School didn't have enough firearms. If all the teachers had had weapons, that shooter would have been killed, and the best way to stop a shooter from attacking you is to arm yourself. That is not what the evidence tells us. The evidence tells us: The more guns there are in a community, the more people get killed.
I will show at another time this same chart on a State-by-State basis, and it will tell you the exact same story. A State that has more firearms has more gun homicides. You are more likely to be the victim of gun violence if you have a gun in your house than if you don't have a gun in your house.
Now, the Second Amendment is an incredibly important, vital, integral piece of the fabric of the U.S. Constitution, and I honor people's decisions to buy a weapon in order to protect themselves. Some people live in violent places. Some people live in very isolated places, and they have made that choice, and that is theirs to make. Of course, there are millions of Americans who own weapons in order to hunt, in order to shoot for sport, a pastime they enjoy and have the right to. But they should purchase those weapons with the understanding that there is no data that tells them they are safer with a weapon in their arm, no data that suggests that the more guns you have in a particular place, the less likely there are to be homicides and gun deaths. It is exactly the opposite.
Every single day there are 86 people who are killed in this country from guns, 2,600 a month, 31,000 a year--another mass shooting in Kansas, another one in Kalamazoo. My entire point is just to say that at some point we have to recognize that our silence has become complicity in these murders. If we are not willing to forge political consensus in this session on legislation that changes gun laws, then at least let's make a commitment to fix our mental health system to make sure law enforcement has the resources they need, to make sure we make straw purchasing illegal so the method by which the shooter in Kansas got the gun has consequences at the Federal level, potentially, as well as at the State level. Let us do something to honor the thousands of voices of victims that mount by the day.
Thank you, Mr. President.
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