Providing for Consideration of H.R. Assault Weapons Ban of 2022
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Speaker, weapons of war are designed for war. They are designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Our country is exceptional in making these weapons of war, these assault weapons, available in the civilian sector, and we have quickly--because those weapons are easier to qualify for than getting a driver's license; they are easier for a teenager to get than to buy a beer, because we have done that, we have turned our churches, our schools, our shopping centers, our entertainment venues, almost any place, into a battleground with one massacre after another.
There is no Second Amendment right to own a machine gun, which has been banned in this country since, I believe, the thirties. But if you talk about rights, how about the rights of those little children in Uvalde to live, the rights of those families to be whole? They have rights, also. And that is what we are protecting today.
I think that we just cannot continue to live like we have been living in the shadow of fear, a terrible kind of American exceptionalism where we are horribly exceptional to the amount of dead children gunned down in their best tennis shoes after end of the school year celebrations, of young parents having to bury their still younger little children; where we are the exception in how many congregants die where they are massacred in their churches or in their temples; where we are the exception, the outlier in how many gruesome bullet-ridden bodies our doctors see month after month.
And God help us because Texas has been among the worst. From El Paso to Uvalde to across the center of the State to the Houston area, murderers, massacres with assault weapons, where one family or another grieves.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Speaker, Texas children right now have no reality as they will soon be returning to school than to duck and cover and learn new exercises. We can do something about that and banning assault weapons is the most critical issue in doing that, not the kind of weak, modest measure that will never change things in Texas that we passed earlier in the year since it is dependent on the Texas legislature, but a direct effort to limit the access to assault weapons that are weapons of war that kill and kill and kill that make us exceptional in quite the wrong way.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source