Gun Violence in America

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I want to thank the distinguished Congresswoman from New York for her comments about Francis Bellamy, the great Christian abolitionist and socialist who authored America's Pledge of Allegiance. He was a great patriot who wanted to unify the country in the wake of the Civil War during the Reconstruction Period. We, indeed, owe him a great debt of gratitude for everything he did for America.

Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about a matter of pressing importance and urgency to the people of America today. It is the question of gun violence and what Congress is doing about the problem of gun violence.

I want to start by invoking something that all of the schoolchildren of America know about, which is the idea of a social contract.

You can go back and read John Locke or Thomas Hobbes, or Rousseau, but all of them began with the idea that, in the state of nature, we are all in a dangerous and perilous condition because there is no law. It is the rule of the jungle. Hobbes said that the state of nature was a condition that was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Because of that, people enter into civil society to create a government.

The first principle of government is that we have got to protect our people. As Cicero put it, the safety and good of the people must be the highest law. That is why we have a social contract.

But, Mr. Speaker, in America today, our social contract is bruised and battered and damaged and tenuous because of the gun violence which has come to our public schools, to our universities, to our churches, to our movie theaters, to the public square.

America's high school students have woken us up to the fact that this is not a normal condition. America is an absolute outlier nation in terms of the levels of gun violence that we permit to take place in our own society. Our social contract is threatened by the gun violence that is a menace to every single American citizen.

Now, we have a social contract, we have got a social covenant, and it is the Constitution of the United States. We know that we have an amendment in there which deals specifically with the question of guns, the Second Amendment, which says: ``A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.''

That is the Second Amendment.

Now, some people would have us believe that, because of the Second Amendment, there is nothing that we can do about the problem of gun violence. If you remember nothing else about what I am about to say, please remember this: this is demonstrably, absolutely, categorically false, and we know it is false because the Supreme Court has told us that it is false.

In its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court adopted the individual rights view of the Second Amendment. There was a contest between those who said, no, you only have a right to bear arms in connection with militia service versus those who said that it is an individual right. The individual right won in a 5-4 decision.

But in the course of making that 5-4 decision, the majority on the Supreme Court agreed, readily, that the right to bear arms is one that can be conditioned on all kinds of regulation by the government. That is true of all of the rights in the Bill of Rights.

Think about the First Amendment, which guarantees all of us the right to speak. You have a right to go protest across the street from the White House, but do you have the right to go protest across the street from the White House at 2 in the morning with 20,000 people without getting a permit? Of course, you do not.

The Supreme Court has said that the exercise of First Amendment rights is conditioned by reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. And in the same sense, the Second Amendment right to keep and to bear arms is conditioned on reasonable time, place, manner, and use restrictions by the government. We know that to be the case. The Supreme Court told us that in Heller.

In Heller, the Court said everybody has a right to the possession of a handgun for purposes of self-defense; everybody's got a right to a rifle for purposes of hunting and recreation. But nobody's got a right to possess a machine gun, even though someone might describe it as an arm; nobody's got a right to possess a sawed-off shotgun, much less does anybody have a right to access a weapon without going through a background check, without going through the government's policy for determining that you are not going to be a danger to yourself or to other people. The Supreme Court was very clear about that.

Those people who were out there saying, ``We can't allow any gun safety regulation or we are going to lose the right to have guns, our guns are going to be taken away,'' are engaging in a knowing falsehood. There is no way that the guns of the people of America--the hundreds of millions of guns that are out there--could be confiscated. They can't be confiscated.

People have a right to them for purposes of self-defense and for purposes of hunting and recreation, but it doesn't give you a right to an AR-15. It doesn't give you a right to carry weapons of war into public schools and into movie theaters and into public places, and it does not give you the right to access guns without a background check, yet that is precisely what the law is today. We have a huge gaping loophole where terrorists can go to a gun show and simply buy a gun without any background check at all.

Now, here is the good news that people want to keep from you. We have great news, America. Mr. Speaker, we know there is good news, and here is the good news.

We have a consensus about what to do in America, starting with a universal criminal and mental background check, supported by, no longer, 95 percent of the American people. In the wake of the Parkland massacre, it is 97 percent of the people who think that you should not be able to access a weapon without first passing a background check.

That is the vast majority of the people, maybe almost a unanimous verdict by the American people. Almost everybody believes that we need to close the gun show loophole, we need to close the internet gun sale loophole, we need to close the 7-Eleven parking lot loophole, and we need to close the loophole that would allow criminals and gangsters and terrorists to go to a gun show and purchase a gun. Ninety-seven percent of the American people agree with that.

Sixty-seven percent of the American people agree with the call of the young people who survived the massacre in Parkland, which took the lives of 17 students and teachers, the call for a ban on assault weapons. Sixty-seven percent of the American people, more than two- thirds of the American people, agree with a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons.

And 75 percent of the American people say that Congress must be acting to reduce gun violence. So we have a consensus over what to do.

But what is happening now?

Well, I serve on the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker, and we had a vote today that had nothing to do with guns. It was about collecting data on bail policies, which is not to say that that is unimportant; but, seriously, millions of people in America are demanding action from Congress, and we can't even have a hearing on the problem of people accessing assault weapons and going to public schools and assassinating our school children at pointblank range.

Now, I had the good fortune of meeting some of the young people from Parkland who have awoken the conscience of the country. One of them was asked a question: Why, suddenly, is America waking up in the wake of the Parkland massacre, which took the lives of 17 people, but it didn't in the same way after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, at Sandy Hook, which took the lives of even more people, 26 people?

She had a fascinating answer. She said: Most of the people killed at Sandy Hook were first graders, and first graders can't start a revolution against the political power of the NRA; but high school students know how to do it because they understand how to contact people, and they know social media. They know Facebook and Twitter, and they have enough education so that they can speak with authority about the recklessness and the negligence of government not addressing the problem.

Congress now is the outlier. Congress will not act.

Are we a failed state such that when more than 95 percent of the American people agree that something needs to be done, Congress cannot act?

Are we abandoning our social contract?

Are we abandoning our primary commitment to defend the lives of our own people?

Well, it is a very serious moment. We are having our Special Order hour on the problem of gun violence, the failure of Congress to act, but the need for Congress to act.

Jayapal), with whom I serve on the House Judiciary Committee.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we are so grateful for Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal from Washington, for her powerful leadership and her lucid discussion today of the gun violence problem.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for placing emphasis on the fact that we have had no hearings in our Congress since we arrived here more than a year ago on the problem of gun violence in the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for placing emphasis on the Dickey amendment, which forbids the expenditure of any public money even to research the epidemiology of gun violence and gun violence epidemics in the way that certain outbreaks of gun violence and mass shootings will trigger others.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman also for placing emphasis on the fact that the Newtown families who come to lobby in Washington, the families from Parkland, just want to see us break the logjam; they just want to see us end the paralysis and do something. And why not start with the thing that is backed by more than 9 out of 10 Americans, a universal criminal and mental background check so that people who are carrying guns in America are the lawful gun owners who can do it responsibly? That is something that the overwhelming majority of American people believe in, yet this Congress seems to be completely stuck, totally hamstrung.

Mr. Speaker, please help us dislodge this legislation.

Now, Congresswoman Jayapal praised her home State of Washington, rightfully, for the actions they have taken recently to ban the bump stocks and to pass other commonsense gun safety reforms.

I would like to talk about what has happened in my home State, the great State of Maryland, which is touching Washington, D.C., where we all are right now.

In 2013, after the catastrophe took place in Newtown, Connecticut, at Sandy Hook, where an AR-15 was used to assassinate 26 people at pointblank range, we acted in Maryland. We passed a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons. We passed a ban on high-capacity magazines.

We gave our State police the right to engage in frequent and unannounced inspections of the gun dealers so that bad apple gun dealers couldn't be dealing firearms directly into the underground.

Then we said if a firearm is lost or stolen, it has got to be reported within 48 hours, and if not, that is a misdemeanor, because what was happening was they were selling guns to criminals, they would surface in a homicide investigation 10 months later, we would trace it back to the gun dealers, and the dealers would say: Oh, yeah. That was stolen. We forgot to report it.

Or they would say: We lost that, but, yeah, we never filed a report.

So now, in our State, you have got to file a report--commonsense gun safety supported by people across the spectrum--so we don't have a leaky system where guns are getting into the wrong hands.

Now, our opponents on this, of course, marched and protested and said they were opposed to all of it. They said this was an attempt to confiscate everybody's guns, which, of course, it was not. And responsible law-abiding gun owners have all the guns that they had before, they have still got them, but it was challenged in court. They said it violated the Second Amendment.

I raise it because I want America to notice this. They sued in the United States District Court in Maryland, and they lost. And the court said, reading the District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008, that the Second Amendment permits reasonable gun safety regulation that does not infringe on the fundamental right to bear arms for self-defense or to have rifles for hunting or recreation, but there is no right for civilians to be carrying military-style hardware and weaponry in public.

They appealed it to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fourth Circuit affirmed the ruling of the district court.

Then they brought it to the United States Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court let that ruling stand.

So there is a perfect example of how you can enact reasonable gun safety regulation and it doesn't infringe anybody's Second Amendment rights and it doesn't impinge on the right of reasonable, law-abiding gun owners to have guns for lawful purposes.

So why are we involved in this terrible, atrocious situation where we have rates of death and fatality and injury greater than six times higher than any other modern industrialized country on Earth?

In the U.K., it is less than 50 people a year who die by gun; in Japan, it is less than 50 or 60 people a year. We are losing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

Is it because we have mental illness and they don't? No. They have got mental illness, too. Is it because Americans are more violent than other people? I don't think so.

It is simply because of the ready access to firearms wherever you go, and anybody can get them almost anywhere. Okay? So we need to follow the rest of the world in terms of enacting reasonable gun safety legislation.

Now, we have got our Second Amendment, so nobody's handguns are going to get taken away. The Supreme Court said it in the Heller decision and reaffirmed that 2 years later, that it applies not just in the District of Columbia directly against Congress, but it applies in the States, in a case that came out of Chicago.

So we know that nobody's handguns are going to be taken away and nobody's rifles are going to be taken away.

All we are talking about is keeping our children and our grandchildren safe; keeping people safe at concerts, like in Las Vegas; keeping people safe in church, like in South Carolina; keeping people safe in their public schools, like in Parkland, Florida; keeping college students safe, like at Virginia Tech. That is what we are talking about doing.

Now, we don't know why Congress won't act. Some people are starting to hypothesize that America has become a failed state, that we can't respond to an almost unanimous demand by our own people to legislate in the interests of public safety, which is the most elementary requirement of a civilized society under a social contract.

Some people say we have become a failed state, like failed states we see around the world. You know that authoritarianism is on the march all over the world, whether it is in Putin's Russia or Duterte's Philippines or Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey, where it is all about enriching the people in power--ignoring the needs of the people, ignoring the rights of the people, but instead, using government as a money-making operation for a tiny group of people.

Have we become a failed state? Is that what we are? I don't think we are a failed state.

We have had other periods in American history where Congress has refused to deal with pressing public policy problems. One of the most famous ones, beginning in the 1830s, was when a proslavery faction within Congress said it would refuse to have any hearings at all and would refuse to entertain any petitions against slavery from anywhere in the country. It was a direct assault on the right to petition Congress for redress of grievances, it was a direct assault on the freedom of speech, but they imposed this stranglehold on Congress so there could be no debate on the most pressing issue of the day.

Now, I am not likening slavery to gun violence. Okay? I want to be clear about that. But I am saying that there are other times in American history where Congress has acted as a chokehold against the ventilation of serious public concerns and grievances. There have been times when Congress has refused to engage in debate, discussion, and analysis of the most pressing problems of the day, and that is where we are right now on gun violence.

All we are saying, Mr. Speaker, to the majority in Congress, is let's have some hearings on this, let's have some hearings on a universal criminal and mental background check being demanded by nearly every American right now. Let's start with that. Is that one thing we can all agree on, that there should be a background check before people go out and obtain weapons of war that they then carry into the hallways and the schoolrooms of our country? Can we have a hearing on that?

If you don't want to vote for it, you can stand up with the 1 or 2 percent of the people who are against it, but allow those of us who want to represent the 97 or 98 percent of the people who are for it to have a vote, because we don't think that terrorists and criminals should be able to go to a gun show and purchase firearms, including AR- 15s, without a criminal background check. We don't think that.

So, Mr. Speaker, we have got a consensus in America on this. Let's not stifle the consensus. Let's not choke off the ability of the American people and their representatives to govern. That is why we were sent here, to legislate.

The essence of legislation is hearings. We have to hear the American people, we have to hear the experts, we have to collect the evidence. We have got to overturn the ban on the collection of statistics about gun violence that was imposed a few decades ago on the CDC. We have got to collect the information, and we have to act.

The time for just prayers and meditation about the problem is long gone, as the young people from Parkland, Florida, have told us.

They were told in the wake of the massacre: It is too early to start debating gun policy.

They turned around, and they said: No. It is too late to be debating gun policy. This should have been done after Las Vegas. It should have been done after San Bernardino County. It should have been done after the Sandy Hook massacre. It should have been done after Virginia Tech.

How many more massacres do we have to await before this Congress decides something really must be done? How many more massacres? That is what America is asking us, Mr. Speaker.

Please, let's do our job. We have sworn an oath to the American people. Let's go and represent the public will, let's make it consistent with the Second Amendment, because it is very easy to do so. We proved it in the State of Maryland, and the Supreme Court has told us we can pass reasonable commonsense gun safety measures without violating anyone's rights.

We have got a consensus in America. In Congress, we have got to do our job and let that consensus become the law.

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