Gun Control Measures
Floor Speech
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Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Madam President, I rise to join my colleague Senator Heinrich and others who have come before. I am calling on Senator McConnell to act now to address the gun crisis in our country.
Every day that the Senate Republican leaders refuse to act, they are making a choice to be complicit as more lives continue to be lost. People across my State and the country want to see action, and they are tired of waiting for it.
I have met with countless families across New York who have lost their children, spouses, friends, community members, and neighbors to gun violence. I have met people who have survived mass shootings and people who live every single day with the threat of gun violence in their neighborhoods. I have heard their stories and seen how their lives have been torn apart by gun violence. Today I want to tell some of those stories to you.
Robert Gaafar, one of my constituents from Long Island and a father of young children, was at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas for work. He heard loud popping noises and soon realized they weren't coming from the performance on stage but from a gun. As the shooter fired round after round, Robert hid behind a metal vending machine for protection. The bullets being fired around him were so powerful he could actually feel the shock waves. He said that he would never forget the silence of 20,000 people at a concert or the horrific screams of grown men and women he could hear as the gunman reloaded. He was lucky. He survived. But 58 people did not, and many more were injured.
Another New Yorker, Trenelle Gabay, had to make the unthinkable decision to take her husband off of life support after he was shot in the crossfire of two rival gangs at a community festival in Brooklyn. He was just an innocent bystander, and, ironically, he was an attorney for the State who helped draft the NY SAFE Act, which set a precedent for one of the strongest gun laws in the country. He was not immune from gun violence himself. As Trenelle told it, her husband's life and bright light were extinguished by guns.
At the trial, Trenelle heard a criminal testify about how easy it was for him to purchase a gun and traffic it from Georgia to New York. It should not be this easy for criminals to get access to dangerous weapons. It should not be so easy for lives to be taken so senselessly.
One mother I met in New York, Jackie Rowe-Adams, lost not one but two sons to gun violence. One of her sons was shot when he was 17 years old outside of a bodega in Harlem. The reason? Two men with a gun believed that her son was staring at them, so they killed him.
Ms. Rowe-Adams lost her second son to gun violence during a robbery outside of her apartment. The boy who shot him was only 13 years old. He should never have had access to a gun. Imagine the horror of being a mother and losing two of your sons to gun violence.
Then there is another one of my constituents, Edwin Vargas. His 16- year-old son Luis was killed on Halloween when an unknown gunman decided to fire his weapon into the crowd in a neighborhood in the Bronx. The gunman was irritated by a group of teenagers who were throwing eggs in his neighborhood, so he began to randomly shoot into the crowd. The gunman hit three innocent bystanders, including Luis. Luis was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
These are the tragic and heart-wrenching stories that New Yorkers have shared with me. They are by no means unique. In every State around the country, there are too many stories just like these. The reality is that mass shootings can and have happened in every corner of this country in all types of places.
Gun violence is becoming the new normal in America. Certainly it has happened in Arizona. We do not have to live in a country where mass shootings occur in our schools, our houses of worships, our movie theaters, our playgrounds, our stores, our community gatherings, at festivals, at concerts, at nightclubs, and at Congress on your corner.
Madam President, I am speaking to you and to every other Republican in this Chamber. We all have a responsibility to do the right thing and stand up to the NRA and stand up to the greed and corruption that is in this country today that makes every decision about whether we have a vote on commonsense gun reform.
I can poll your State for you. I can ask every NRA member in America: Do you support universal background checks, banning large magazines, military-style weapons? Leave them in the hands of military members, not someone who walks into a store and buys them because he wants to shoot large numbers of people in minutes and seconds. That is what is happening in America today.
I would like you to look up because I have to say this is something all of us should be caring about, especially from Arizona, where my dear friend Gabby Giffords was shot for doing her job and a young girl showing up for ``Congress on Your Corner'' to meet her Congresswoman died. It is not OK. The time for turning a blind eye is over.
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