Gun Violence
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, let me say a word about gun violence because in the city of Chicago, which I am honored to represent, it breaks my heart what is happening in that city.
Not last weekend but the weekend before, there were 37 shootings in the course of a weekend. Seven people died. This weekend, 9 people were killed and 26 others wounded by gunfire. This is the beginning of the summer months. I am afraid that it tells us we still have a massive challenge ahead of us. We have to do more at every single level.
Let's start with what the HEAL Initiative is doing and bring some hope to the lives of folks, give them an opportunity for a decent- paying job, let them have an affordable place to live that is safe from gunshots and other threats to a family.
We have to work on this together to deal with the criminal justice system. We learned the hard way that simply putting tougher sentences down for something like crack cocaine is not necessarily the answer. In fact, it can backfire, as it did, we learned, over the last 20 years. We have to have sensible criminal sentencing guidelines that punish wrongdoing, of course; keep dangerous people off the street, of course; but give people a chance to rebuild their lives. Many of them will be able to do it. Let me also say that we have to have effective prosecution.
We lost one of our best Chicago policewomen just last year. Her name was Ella French. Ella French was a lovely, young, respected police officer who was sitting in a car with her partner. A fellow came up with a gun, shot her in the back of the head--unfortunately, killed her--and then shot her partner in the head, too, and blinded him in one eye. His name is Officer Yanez. I met him at the South Side Irish Parade.
Well, the tribute to Ella French, who lost her life in the line of duty, was like something I have never seen before in Chicago. They went to a high school in the southern part of the city and took the chapel and set it aside for visitors to come pay their respects. The Presiding Officer wouldn't believe the lines that went on for blocks, men and women in uniform and everybody else--myself, my wife, folks in the city--paying their respects to Ella French. She was an extraordinary person.
The gun that killed her was a straw purchase gun. What does that mean? Somebody went into a Federal gun dealer and said: I want to buy a gun. They looked and checked, and that person had no criminal record. The person bought the gun, turned around, went outside, and handed it to a convicted felon, who then turned around and killed this policewoman. That is a straw purchase.
Unfortunately, for too long, we have treated that as a bookkeeping crime, a misdemeanor, nothing serious. It is serious. Straw purchases are a way to avoid the prohibition under the law of a person with a criminal record buying a gun. We ought to treat it as a serious matter.
I have appealed to all the U.S. attorneys in my State, and I hope all Senators will talk to the U.S. attorneys across the Nation. Take straw purchasing seriously. This is not a bookkeeping error; this is a deadly crime that can kill innocent, good people like Ella French and maimed the officer who was with her. So we ought to take that seriously.
This weekend that I just referred to, the previous one, with 37 shootings, 1 of them was on Sunday night. Madam President, they went to the scene afterwards and found 68 cartridges--68. The people in the neighborhood said it sounded like a war zone. Two of the cartridges were from an AK-47, a military assault type rifle, which has no place anywhere except in the military or maybe some police application, but in this case, it was being used in a shootout between two people in cars.
I don't understand what happened next. They ended up finding one of the people who were involved in the shooting. He had a gun. He had a gun illegally. He doesn't have a firearm identification card, required under Illinois law. After taking a look at the facts of the situation, they plan on charging him with a misdemeanor. What is going on here? A misdemeanor for a shootout on the streets of Chicago with 68 cartridges on the ground afterwards?
Whether it is a straw purchase treated as a bookkeeping error or a shootout with an AK-47 treated as a misdemeanor, we have to send the word out that this is unacceptable--not just in Chicago but unacceptable across this country.
If you want to legally own a gun, store it properly, use it properly and legally, I am all for it, and I think that is what the Second Amendment is all about. But what is going on on streets of Chicago, the streets of East St. Louis, Rockford, and so many other cities is a shootout with a massive amount of guns that are finding their way onto the streets. So we have to take that seriously.
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