Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about gun ownership and gun safety in Virginia and in the United States. I speak as a gun owner, and I speak as a strong Second Amendment supporter. I want to do a couple of things in this speech, but one thing I want to do is put to rest the idea that gun owners, gun ownership, and the Second Amendment are incompatible with reasonable gun safety rules.
I accept the ruling, the holding, and the principle announced by the Supreme Court in the Heller decision that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to bear arms and conveys that right to the American public. There was, and there remains, some controversy over the ruling. Some have argued that the text of the amendment discusses only the right to bear arms in the context of participating in a militia, which in 1787 was a necessary strategy for defending the Nation during a time when we had no standing Army. For years, many scholars and courts accepted that notion and argued that the Second Amendment was sort of different from the others in that way. In Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment, like all the other amendments, conveys an individual right, and I accept and believe that interpretation.
But the Heller decision came with an important caveat. The Second Amendment is the only amendment that uses the phrase ``well regulated.'' The amendment may convey a personal right to gun ownership, and it does, but it explicitly acknowledges that regulations are part of what may be necessary. Courts subsequent to Heller have frequently held that the particular regulations are well within the scope of the Second Amendment.
The NRA and other organizations often pretend that the phrase ``well regulated'' doesn't even appear in the amendment. Often, they will print a copy of the Second Amendment or the text, and they will have only the second clause, omitting the ``well regulated'' phrase. While that phrase, like the text of the amendment itself, is set in the context of a militia, it is clear from its usage that the Framers knew firearms were dangerous, though necessary, and there needed to be rules to ensure their safe use. In other words, the phrase ``well regulated'' in the text is not there to refer to the kind of uniform that a militia member would wear, whether they should have a beard or not. It is there to refer to the need for discipline and training to keep those people who bear arms behaving in a reasonable and safe manner.
Even if the phrase ``well regulated'' did not appear in the text of the Second Amendment--and that phrase ``well regulated'' appears in no other amendment, only the second--it would still be pretty clear that the Second Amendment right, just like other constitutional rights, is not absolute and free from any governmental rules. The Heller decision, authored by Justice Scalia, stated this very clearly: A ruling of individual ownership and use of firearms does not restrict the government from imposing reasonable rules on their use. Many subsequent cases have affirmed these reasonable rules over time.
The First Amendment, for example, guarantees the right to free speech and makes clear that no law infringing upon such a right is constitutional. But the Supreme Court has long held that government agencies can place reasonable limits on the time, place, and manner of speech, so long as the limits don't discriminate on the content of the idea that is expressed. An easy example is, a city can ban sound trucks with megaphones from driving through neighborhoods blaring ads in the middle of the night while people are sleeping. The right to free speech is subject to reasonable limitation.
Similarly, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, but States punish civil libel through their civil litigation and court processes. A newspaper trashing somebody through a knowingly false statement can be subjected to civil liability, and that paper can't claim the right to free press to shield it from accountability.
The Second Amendment, in this way, is similar to the First Amendment, and I could go through other examples. While the right to ownership, to bear and use arms--not just ownership but using arms--may not be infringed, reasonable rules regarding gun usage are explicitly contemplated by the amendment and constitutionally allowable.
It is important to recognize that we all tolerate reasonable limits on gun use. One common use of firearms in Virginia and Alaska--I know from my one visit to Alaska that this is the case--is hunting. In Virginia, the voters of our State, by referendum, amended our State constitution in 2000 to guarantee to all a right to hunt, fish, and gather game subject to rules prescribed by our general assembly. I was legal counsel for this effort, before I was in State office, arguing the validity of the amendment when a citizens group sued to try to keep it off the ballot. We prevailed in the litigation, and the amendment passed overwhelmingly, with more than 60 percent of the vote. That vote showed our population both embraced the right to hunt but also embraced the acceptance of the notion that this right should be subject to reasonable rules imposed by the legislature.
We have many State-imposed rules on hunting in Virginia, just as I am sure is the case in Alaska. The State determines the seasons in which hunting can occur--those seasons can differ depending on what you are hunting--where it can occur, the license you need, the training you must complete, which days of the week are open for hunting, what kinds of weapons can be used in hunting, and even the size of a magazine in any automatic or repeating weapon that can be used in hunting.
For example, in Virginia, by statute, you can hunt with a repeating shotgun, but the magazine can contain no more than three rounds. If the magazine on a weapon is larger than that--a larger magazine--you are required to have a plug or filler in the magazine that will reduce its capacity to no more than three total rounds, as measured either in the magazine or in the chamber itself.
The bottom line for these regulations, which are well accepted and understood in Virginia, is clear. Even the use of firearms for hunting, protected by the Virginia Constitution as well as by the Second Amendment, is subject to safety rules that society fully accepts. The clear constitutionality of gun safety rules and the public acceptance of these rules pose stark questions to Congress.
Why, in the face of escalating tragedy, are we so unwilling to adopt commonsense gun safety rules designed to reduce gun violence? Why does Congress shield gun manufacturers from liability with a Federal protection that we don't give to the manufacturers of other products? Why does Congress limit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using its resources to research gun violence? Why does Congress limit the ability of law enforcement to fully trace the use of guns that are used to commit crimes? Why does Congress prohibit weapon use and ownership by certain classes of dangerous individuals but resist a universal background check system that would be necessary to enforce that prohibition? Why won't Congress enact the same kinds of magazine limitations on weapons used to kill people that we embrace on weapons used to kill deer? Why won't Congress ban weapons of war--weapons of war that are used by trained officials, as was the case with the Presiding Officer in his military service or my son in military service, but why won't we ban those weapons of war from the streets of our country?
Self-defense, sport, hunting are all protected and encompassed within the broad protections of the Second Amendment. There is not, there has never been, and there never will be an effort to confiscate all weapons in the country because of their popular acceptance and because of the clear commands of the Constitution. But why can't we have reasonable safety rules?
America's children--so many of them appeared here yesterday, children from a middle school in Northern Virginia, some high schoolers from Thomas Jefferson High School; I visited with students from Florida-- posed some even starker questions to us.
Does Congress care more about its children or more about contributions from the NRA and gun manufacturers? Can adults act like adults and try to keep children safe? Those were the questions that I heard from the students on the Capitol steps yesterday.
I applaud the children of the country who are asking these questions. They stand together with an overwhelming majority of Americans who believes we can do better and we need to do better. I have seen the tragedy of gun violence, but I have also seen that we can do better and that part of that is having better rules on guns.
When I was elected to the city council in Richmond in 1994, we had the second highest homicide rate in the United States. That was the only top 10 list we were on. That is not the one you want to be on. I went to too many funerals and too many wakes and too many crime scenes, and I was in too many church basements with support groups of homicide victims' families, and I don't want to do those kinds of things again.
Yet, through the pain of that--multiple efforts by multiple people-- we helped reduce our violent crime rate risk. We dropped the homicide rate by 60 percent. We dropped the aggravated assault/violent crime rate by nearly the same number. We did a number of things, but one of the things we did was to recognize that we had a problem with guns. It was not just about people or just about mental health. Those were issues, sure, but we had a high gun carry rate in Richmond. The gun carry rate means: In 100 stops that the police would make, what percentage of the time were people carrying weapons? In Richmond, we just had an unusually high percentage compared to other cities for a variety of the reasons.
What we decided to do is, if we could bring down the gun carry rate, we may not make bad people good people, but we could avoid an argument's breaking bad and then turning into a homicide or an aggravated assault. We were able to do things that brought the gun carry rate down, that made people leave their guns at home, if they were leaving their homes, instead of putting them in their pockets. By doing that, we helped to bring down gun violence. We found that you could take concrete steps to make people safer.
I was the Governor at the time of what was the worst shooting in the history of the United States. The weird thing to say about my own State is that I wish it had always been the worst shooting--the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April of 2007, when 32 people were killed. It has now been eclipsed by shootings in Orlando and Las Vegas and Newtown. So many other tragedies have happened since then that even some of the particulars of the Virginia Tech shooting start to recede in memory as new tragedies happen.
It was painful. I interacted with the 32 families who had lost their kids and who had lost their parents who were professors, and I have continued to interact with them over the years and to learn what went wrong that day, and a lot of things went wrong. Vowing to the families that we would try to fix them has been a cause of my life for the last 11 years.
We also learned through the pain some things we could do to make our communities safer. In this particular case, there were problems with mental health, and there were problems with privacy rules, and there were problems with campus safety protocols. Yet a significant problem was that we had a flaw in the background record check system. A young individual who had been adjudicated mentally ill and dangerous and was prohibited from owning a weapon was able to slip through the cracks in the system to get a weapon that he shouldn't have had. So the lesson we learned is, with a better background check system, you reduce the risk of tragedy.
Whether it is a common street crime of the kind that occurs every day and may not get the attention on the weekly news or whether it is a mass shooting that gets the attention on the weekly news, I have had some scar tissue over this, but at least the scar tissue has taught me a few things. One of the things I have learned is you can take meaningful steps, and if you do so, you make communities safer. If you know that you can take steps to make people safer, then you must. You must.
I will conclude and just say this.
We need a debate on the floor of this Chamber about how to reduce gun violence and promote gun safety. We haven't had one since April of 2013. It has been 5 years, and the list of tragedies is getting longer and longer and longer. We shouldn't be afraid to entertain both Republican and Democratic proposals for reducing the scourge of gun violence. There will be different kinds of proposals, and that is as it should be.
It is just like the debate we had about Dreamers a few weeks ago. There were different proposals put on the table that were going in different directions. We know in this body that we need to get 60 votes to get anything passed, which means nothing will pass unless there is some bipartisan support. Yet we shouldn't be afraid of having that debate. We have been afraid to have the debate, but our children are afraid for their lives. If they are showing the courage to speak out for change, the least we can do is show that we are listening.
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