Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, some of my colleagues are invoking the Second Amendment quite promiscuously today, but they obviously haven't read any of the relevant Supreme Court authority because Justice Scalia, in District of Columbia v. Heller, explicitly upheld reasonable, commonsense regulations to guarantee that violent criminals don't get guns.

So, everything that we are doing is perfectly in advance of, in pursuit of, Second Amendment rights that are exercised coextensively with the public safety and with the common good.

Here is a regulation that we need, that we have known we have needed ever since a violent white supremacist killed nine African-American Christian worshippers at a Bible class in Charleston, South Carolina. He should have been denied a gun, but he got it because the background check search wasn't completed in 3 days. He got it automatically, although he shouldn't have had it, and nine people are dead because of it.

We say, let's close that loophole. Just like with H.R. 8, let's make sure that the universal background check is universal.

Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the American people support it.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman very much for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, this is reasonable, commonsense gun safety legislation contemplated by Justice Scalia, by the Supreme Court, under the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

It is what America needs so that we don't have a rate of gun violence and gun deaths 25 times higher than everybody else in the industrialized world.

Yet, some people are so under the spell of the NRA, a deeply corrupt organization that is ripping off money from loyal gun owners around the country, that they are unwilling to stand with the common good.

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