Joseph Woodrow Hatchett United States Courthouse and Federal Building--
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, this morning, the Supreme Court weakened gun safety laws in America for the first time in over a decade. It gutted a century's-old law to make sure that people carrying concealed weapons actually needed them. The Court is taking us backward at a time when the American people are demanding that we do more, not less, to protect our communities.
The shooting at Columbine High School happened the year before my oldest daughter was born. She is now 22 years old. We have raised three daughters, and their entire generation has grown up in the shadow of gun violence. Since Columbine, my State has endured one tragedy after another.
In 2012, a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora.
In 2019, a shooter injured eight students at a STEM high school in Highlands Ranch.
Last March, a shooter killed 10 people at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. That was almost a year to the day, really, of the shootings in Buffalo, which took another 10 lives of people who had just gone to shop for their families.
Two months after that grocery store shooting in Colorado, a gunman killed six people at a birthday party in Colorado Springs.
Now, I remember back--it is hard because, over time, you lose track of things--in 2017, after a gunman in Las Vegas killed 58 Americans after shooting across the street from a hotel room. I came to work the following Monday, and I realized at about three-quarters of the way through the day that nobody had talked to me about the shooting. I don't know whether it was the shooting before that or the two or three or four before that when we became so desensitized that 58 people could be killed in Las Vegas, and it wasn't even mentioned the following Monday.
We cannot allow this to become normal in this country, and the people of Colorado have refused for this to become normal in this country. It is not just mass shootings; it is the daily shootings that stalk our communities like the West Side of Chicago, where I have spent time with my friend Arne Duncan who, after being the Secretary of Education, has gone back to his hometown to try to keep young men from killing. They can't afford for us to continue to just move on and forget that it ever happened. Communities, once they have been savaged by something like the Aurora movie theater shooting or the Columbine shooting, never move on.
The pages here are a little bit younger than my daughters are, but I can tell you that there is a whole generation of Americans that has grown up in this country savaged by gun violence and the prospect that it could happen to them when they go to school the next day or the next week. You can see it. You can see kids sitting on the couch, cringing, when they are watching the television reports, wondering whether that is going to be them or their classmates.
They have carried a burden that no generation of Americans has ever had to carry. No generation of humans living in the industrialized world has had to carry this particular burden. Today, our kids are growing up with a reasonable fear that they could get shot in their schools or in their temples or in their churches.
I didn't grow up in a country with more gun-related deaths than in virtually any country in the industrialized world. That was not the country I grew up in. I grew up in a country with a Second Amendment but not a country with more shootings than anyplace else in the industrialized world. Our attitude about this has changed. It is different from what our parents and grandparents believed, no matter what party they were in.
After a shooting, I heard somebody on the radio--some well-known talk show host--say that this was just the price of freedom, that being victimized in a mass shooting or being worried that your family members could be killed in a mass shooting was just the price of freedom. That is not what freedom meant to America when I was growing up. Partly what freedom means is being free from the fear that you are going to get gunned down. That is a freedom, and we have denied that freedom to the next generation of Americans. What a shame that somebody would say something like that after a mass shooting. What a limited view of what freedom is. What a surrender that represents to our children and the victims of these crimes.
In 2020, the leading cause of death for kids in America was guns-- guns--not car accidents, not drugs but guns. There was a study that looked at how many kids, ages 4 or younger, had been killed by guns across 29 industrialized countries. This was of kids 4 or younger in 29 industrialized countries. The United States accounted for 97 percent of the deaths. This country accounted for 97 percent of the deaths of kids who were 4 years old and under. What a disgrace. What an indictment. The entire rest of the industrialized world accounted for 3 percent. We accounted for 97 percent. We have nearly 200 times the rate of violent gun deaths as Japan or South Korea and nearly 100 times what they experience in the United Kingdom.
I can tell you, speaking as a father, it is not because we love our children any less or because we are uniquely violent or that somehow we have got a mental health problem that other countries don't have or that we are mentally more unwell, which I hear some people say. It is because we have a U.S. Senate, year after year after year, that has been paralyzed by the National Rifle Association, by the NRA. We have a Senate that has allowed our kids to get shot in schools, in movie theaters, in grocery stores, and at concerts but has offered nothing but thoughts and prayers. We have a Senate that, until now, has failed to respond to the overwhelming demand of the American people to protect our communities.
That is what I hear when I go home. I live in a Western State. As you will hear, we have been able to enact meaningful gun reforms in my State. If we can make progress in a Western State like Colorado, where people are demanding it--Democrats, Independents, Republicans, and most importantly, all of our children are demanding it--we can do it here. I have said it over and over and over again on this floor after we have had mass shooting after mass shooting across our country. Finally, for the first time in a decade, we have the chance to make progress.
I want to thank my colleagues. I really do. I don't mean that in the usual way that people do when they come out here and say, you know, ``I thank my colleagues.'' I want to thank my colleagues Chris Murphy and John Cornyn for leading this really important bipartisan effort.
I strongly support what they have put forward, which would strengthen background checks for young people buying firearms, so we are checking their mental health and juvenile records.
It would help States strengthen their red flag laws, which would help keep guns out of the hands of people who are a threat to themselves or others. We passed a bill like that already in Colorado.
It would make a historic investment in mental health and school security. I said a minute ago that sometimes you just hear people talking about how we have mental health, and I pointed out that we probably have got the same mental health that other countries in the world have, but that doesn't mean that it is not an issue. It is an issue. We are having an epidemic of mental health and behavioral health on the back end of this pandemic, especially among adolescents in this country and in the State of Colorado. There is $15 billion in this bill for mental health, and I am proud that that is in there. That is a historic investment, and it is both sides that are making it.
We are going to close the boyfriend loophole, which allows abusive partners to buy a gun. We are going to crack down on straw purchases, where people illegally buy guns on behalf of someone else. That is a big problem we are going to address in this bill.
Frankly, I don't know how anybody on this floor could object to any of those ideas. I don't know how anyone could go home and say they opposed investing in mental health or making sure they are not letting a troubled 18-year-old have access to an AR-15 or some other weapon.
On that point, this can't be the end of our work. There is more for us to do. We should raise the age for buying a semiautomatic weapon from 18 to 21. We should pass universal background checks. In Colorado, after Columbine, we passed universal background checks. I have said it over and over again on this floor. Every year, somewhere around 3 percent of the people who try to buy a gun can't buy a gun in Colorado. Do you know why they can't buy a gun? Because they are convicted felons, because they are murderers, because they are domestic abusers.
In the 10, 12 years that I have been coming down here talking about this, I have challenged people. I have said: Come tell me why Colorado is not safer with that law in place. There is nobody who has ever come here and said, ``Here is why you are not safer,'' because obviously we are safe. The country would be safer and Colorado would be safer if we pass background checks at the national level.
We should close the gun show loophole. We should limit the size of magazines, which we also have done in my Western State of Colorado. We should ban bump stocks. People in Colorado and across the country overwhelmingly support these steps. But in the meantime, let's pass this bipartisan proposal.
A few weekends ago--it was actually over the Memorial Day weekend--I had high school kids--not in the same place and not just one--literally coming up to me in tears out of desperation that we were not responding to what had happened in Texas and we hadn't done anything in this country about guns. I think we need to show them and the young people who are here today, the young people who are living all over America, that we aren't so broken that we can't respond to one more massacre of kids at a school. We need to show them when we have this opportunity to demonstrate that we are not going to fail again and that we can succeed in passing this bipartisan bill and that, after all these years, we can meet the American people's reasonable expectation to begin to protect our communities against gun violence that happens in the United States of America and only in the United States of America.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source