Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under the Rule Submitted By the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Relating to ``Factoring Criteria for Firearms with Attached `Stabilizing Braces'
Floor Speech
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman kindly for his courtesy in granting me this time.
Today is June 13. We have had 164 days in the year 2023, and we have had 291 mass shootings. We are having, on average, 1\1/2\ mass shootings every single day in America.
Of course, our colleagues would prefer not to talk about it because they say it is impolite to talk about a mass shooting on the day it happens. With that theory, we would never talk about it, and we would continue ad infinitum into the carnage and the bloodshed that this unlimited, open-arms policy is giving America today.
A number of my colleagues have invoked the Second Amendment. They only quote half of it. They say: `` . . . the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''
What about the first half of it? ``A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''
They say we want to repeal the Second Amendment. Mr. Speaker, we don't want them to repeal the Second Amendment. We want them to read the Second Amendment because the Second Amendment would ask us why we are allowing people to go into elementary schools, Walmarts, supermarkets, churches, and synagogues all over America with AR-15s enabled sometimes with a stabilizing brace--as in Dayton, Ohio; Boulder, Colorado; Colorado Springs; Nashville, Tennessee--and assassinate our people.
If a foreign government were doing it, we would declare war on them, but since we are just allowing the gun industry to spread these weapons of mass destruction around the country, they want to allow it.
They say that the Second Amendment must be respected in this strange and distorted way because they believe the Second Amendment gives people the right to overthrow the government. This insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment means that the people must have an arsenal equal to that of the government.
Well, it is very hard to explain the rest of the Constitution, then. The Second Amendment doesn't mention anything about rebellion or insurrection.
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Mr. RASKIN. Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 says Congress has the power to call forth the militias from the States in order to ``suppress insurrections.''
Does that sound like a pro-insurrection document to you?
How about the Republican Guarantee Clause?
Congress shall guarantee to the people of the States a republican form of government and assist them in putting down domestic violence.
How about the treason clause, which says that treason shall consist of levying arms against the Union?
I could give you six more examples like that, but why don't we pause on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says that anybody who has sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and violates that oath by engaging in insurrection or rebellion shall never be allowed to hold Federal or State office again.
That is not the meaning of our Constitution.
The regulation the administration has adopted is perfectly constitutional, so if you want more bloodshed, just stand for that. It has got nothing to do with the Second Amendment. It is perfectly constitutional for us to engage in reasonable gun safety regulation. Check out Heller v. The District of Columbia. Justice Scalia wrote that opinion.
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