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Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to just share candid emotions about yesterday's tragic shooting of schoolchildren who were 2 days from the end of the school year in Texas--19 deaths of little ones and 2 teachers and others injured. This is rough. I don't have any notes because I am really emotional about it. These shootings kind of give me PTSD, I have to admit.

I was the mayor of Richmond, and our city had the second highest homicide rate in the United States. At a much younger period of my life, I found myself going to too many funerals, to too many wakes, to maybe the most memorable crime scenes, then also to homicide victims' family support group meetings in church basements in my city.

Then I got to be the Governor of Virginia. In April of 2007, my wife and I landed in Japan while leading a trade mission, and we went to a hotel and immediately got a phone call saying that there was a shooting underway on the campus of Virginia Tech University and that I should turn on CNN, which I did, in Japan.

As I saw the events unfold, I said: Take us right back to the airport.

We had flown 14 hours. We were in the hotel for about an hour but went right back to the airport and flew all the way back home to what was the worst day of my life in trying to comfort 32 family members who had lost kids or their spouses who were faculty members--and that process went on for years--in the days right after the horrible tragedy but then commissioning a study about what went wrong and then trying to find an appropriate settlement with these families that would honor their loved ones.

I had to deal with State police officers--hardened, hardened law enforcement veterans--who walked into the classrooms at Virginia Tech, to find carnage and on each body a cell phone ringing because a parent had seen it on television and wanted to call to make sure it wasn't one of their children who had been killed. My law enforcement officers talked about how those rings that would never be answered just haunted them, haunted them.

So when there are these shootings at a school, at a nightclub, at a concert, in a grocery store, in a church, in a synagogue, I feel like I am back in April of 2007, experiencing those emotions for the first time.

I was analyzing my own emotions for the first time last night. Why have I not been able to reach a point of more--I don't know--emotional equilibrium about this after 15 years? I realized that the reason was that my emotional reaction that is kind of a PTSD thing is not just because of the shootings, not just because of the deaths, not just because of the promising lives cut short; it is compounded by a realization that, here in this body, we have done nothing.

It would be bad enough to experience the violence and be reminded of that most painful time in my life, but to experience it as a U.S. Senator, as a Member of a body, and to say, ``Well, what have we done? We didn't do anything at the Federal level after Virginia Tech, and we didn't do anything after Pulse, and we didn't do anything after Las Vegas, and we didn't do anything after Sandy Hook, and we didn't do anything after one tragedy after the next,'' then that compounds in some ways, and that is the thing that makes the emotional reaction a reaction that is as fresh today as it was in April of 2007. It is a wound that can't heal until we do something to heal the injury, to heal the problem.

I was thinking about this last night, and I was trying to, you know, think, what is some wisdom that I can derive to make me feel less down and less despondent? And I just thought of two things that I wanted to share. One is a spiritual insight, and the other is a practical reason not to lose hope.

So, as a spiritual insight, a few years ago, Pope Francis was kicking off a yearlong effort to encourage the revitalization of parish life-- not the life of the big, universal church but the life of parishes. He challenged parishes, but this challenge could go for people, and it certainly could go for political leaders. He challenged parishes to be (statement made in Spanish) ``islands of mercy in the midst of a sea of indifference,'' and I thought, what an interesting challenge.

The thing about that challenge that I thought was so beautiful and a little bit unexpected is he didn't counterpose mercy to evil or mercy to cruelty or mercy to hatred; he contrasted mercy with indifference-- with indifference.

There is evil in the world, and there is hatred in the world, and there is cruelty in the world. Yet usually those forces are not strong enough to succeed for very long unless--unless--there is widespread indifference. We are challenged not to be indifferent.

If we assess why the Senate, this great deliberative body, has been unwilling to act for 15 years, I don't think it is cruelty or evil; it is indifference. It is the very thing that Pope Francis was warning us to avoid.

We should be merciful. We should not be indifferent. Evil doesn't thrive for very long absent indifference. Yet, despite what we often say after tragedies like this, with our thoughts and our prayers and our sincere emotions, if we don't demonstrate by more than just words that we are touched by these tragedies, then we are committing the sin of indifference.

I hope very much that the tragedy of these little children's deaths may push us out of the indifference that we have been sunk in at least on this issue. I really hope that it will.

Then, finally, there is a practical reason I am not going to give up hope that it will. I mentioned that I was the mayor of Richmond, dealing with a homicide problem, and that I was the Governor during what was at the time the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States. Sadly, it has been eclipsed. The Virginia Tech shooting is no longer the most tragic shooting in history. Others have eclipsed it in terms of the numbers of those killed.

I felt that same despair then, and I threw myself into trying to make changes. I made the changes in the Virginia laws that I could make as the Governor by executive action, but there are some things I couldn't do by executive action. I needed the support of my legislature to do a comprehensive background check bill because, in the case of the Virginia Tech shooting, Seung-Hui Cho, the disturbed 19-year-old who committed that crime, was legally barred from owning a weapon, but weaknesses in the background check system didn't catch that, and he was able to get the weapons that led to that carnage.

I couldn't get my legislature, even in the aftermath of the worst shooting in the history of the United States, to be willing to take action, but we never gave up. We kept pushing. We kept pushing in Virginia, the headquarters' State of the National Rifle Association. We kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and in 2019, 12 years after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, my legislature passed a set of commonsense gun safety rules: one handgun a month, a ban on certain kinds of weapons that nobody needs, a comprehensive background check, mental health support--a series of initiatives. My legislature did pass it in 2019, and my State is safer as a result, but 12 years was a long time to wait. There were a lot of tragedies that happened between 2007 and 2019.

Thank God for the Virginia Tech family members and for the other advocates who said: We will wait. We are not going away. We are patient. We are discouraged. Each loss we feel afresh, but we are not stopping until we make that happen.

In my first months in the Senate, we voted on the floor on a comprehensive background check bill. I think that was the last time we had a meaningful debate about gun safety policy on the floor of this body--9 years ago. It is like there is a gag rule here. You know, it used to be, in Congress, you were not allowed to have debate or to vote about issues dealing with slavery during the 1830s. It is like we have a gag rule about debating gun safety on the floor of this body.

But I remember voting that day, and it was on the anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech that we voted on a bipartisan background check bill in this body in 2013. The Sandy Hook families were sitting in the Galleries, and many of the Virginia Tech families had come up to join them to offer them support. I was reminded of the Scripture and the letter of Paul to the Hebrews being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. And here we were on the floor, trying to respond to this tragedy and do something to ease their grief, and we fell a couple of vote shorts. We couldn't get to 60. I think we had 57 votes that day for a background check bill. That was painful. It was painful. It was especially painful to fall short in the view of all of these grieving family members.

But I draw hope from this. If we can make progress on this issue in Virginia--the headquarters of the NRA--we can make it in the U.S. Senate. It may not happen as quickly as I want, and it may not happen while I am still here to see it, but there is no reason to give up. If we can do this in Virginia, we can do this in the U.S. Senate, and we ought to. There is nothing we can do to bring back the lives of these young people, but if we can act to decrease the chance that this will ever happen again, they will at least have the ability to grab on and say: Our advocacy made a difference, and kids who go to school will be safer in the future.

This is the last thing I will say, and I will sit down. I was walking around the building this morning, and because I am fluent in Spanish and people around here know it--a lot of the Capitol staffers are Latinos, and they talk to me in Spanish--I passed by a longtime Capitol staffer who said in Spanish: Senator, what is going on? What is going on with this country?

I said: I know what you are asking me about, and it is such a tragedy.

Then she said this to me. She is from El Salvador. She said: My country is a mess, and the violence is awful, and the homicide rate is unacceptable, but no children in schools feel unsafe. No people going to church services feel unsafe. What is going on, Senator?

I didn't have a good answer for her. I didn't have a good answer for her.

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