Getting Gun Criminals Off the Streets

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Speaker, the mass shootings across our country cry out for solutions that work. The good news is we know what works, and we also know what doesn't work.

We have been passing gun control laws for more than 50 years. The number of American households with firearms has dropped significantly in those years.

So let me ask: Are things getting better or worse?

We know this from decades of experience: Gun control laws are extremely effective at disarming law-abiding citizens. They are completely ineffective at disarming criminals, madmen, and terrorists. They create a world where law-abiding citizens are defenseless and the gunman is king.

The day after the Uvalde massacre, a criminal with an AR-15-style rifle shot into a crowd that was gathered for a graduation party in Charleston, West Virginia. A woman with a concealed weapon shot him dead on the spot. Nobody else was hurt. Had that occurred on a school property or other so-called gun-free zone, the death toll could easily have been counted by the dozens.

The left scoffs at the notion that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.

Well, do they know of any other way?

There is none.

The only question is how long it will take for that good guy with a gun to show up. It has often been said that the police can be there in minutes when seconds count. And what we found time and again is that even when the police get there, they don't always act.

Those who are directly threatened by a gunman are those who are in the best position to stop such an attack because they are there on the spot and their lives depend on it. And yet the left won't let them.

We think nothing of seeing an armed guard at a bank or a shopping mall. They are there to protect our money and our merchandise by killing bad guys with guns. Yet the left goes berserk when anyone suggests that we do the same thing to protect our children.

What makes the left believe gun laws will be any more effective at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals than our drug laws have been at keeping drugs out of the hands of addicts?

The difference is that drug laws don't disarm law-abiding citizens from defending themselves, their children, and their fellow citizens. Gun laws do.

The President tells us that hardening our schools isn't the answer. Well, if he actually meant that, he ought to dismiss the Secret Service and open the front door of the White House and be sure to declare it a gun-free zone.

Of course, hardening vulnerable venues like schools works. There is a reason why 98 percent of mass shootings occur in so-called gun-free zones: There is nobody there to shoot back, and the criminals know that. The Buffalo shooter noted precisely that in his manifesto.

The good news is we know what works. Prosecuting gun criminals and putting them in prison until they are old and gray works. Yet woke district attorneys across the country refuse to do so. Executing murderers works. Yet the left has largely succeeded in all but abolishing the death penalty.

And protecting the right of responsible citizens to return fire works. It stops an estimated half million to 2 million crimes in this country every year.

The father of modern policing, Sir Robert Peale, often observed that the police are simply an extension of community; that, in reality, the community is the police and the police are the community. Every citizen, he said, has a right and duty to defend themselves and to uphold the law. The police are there, not to replace private citizens, but to support them.

So let me ask, is the surest path out of this violent chapter of our history the quixotic quest to get 400 million guns off the streets, or is it to get the criminals who use them off the streets? That is what we once did, before social justice replaced criminal justice.

We prosecuted gun criminals to the fullest measure of the law. We executed murderers. We identified the dangerously mentally ill and confined them so we could treat them. These measures worked until the left seized control of our cities and reversed them.

I think it is long past time to take those streets back, get the criminals and dangerously mentally ill off of them, and protect our children with the same resolve and force as we use to protect our money.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source