Unlv Students and Faculty Return to Campus

Floor Speech

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Ms. LEE of Nevada. Mr. Speaker, this is the first week of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' spring semester, a time when students should be excited to see their friends after winter break and faculty begin to review the syllabus with an eager class.

Sadly, this won't be a typical week back for the students of UNLV. That is because this week is the first week that students will be returning to in-person classes since last month's horrifying shooting in which a gunman took the lives of three professors and critically wounded a fourth.

Thousands of students and faculty members were forced to huddle in classrooms behind locked and barricaded doors, waiting for hours to find out whether their campus was safe or not.

Immediately after the shooting, I, and many of my colleagues, demanded once again that Congress do something, just anything, to curb our Nation's gun violence epidemic.

Since then, our country has witnessed another 70 school shootings. That is in just 6 weeks. How many pieces of legislation to address gun violence have been brought to the floor in that time? Zero. It is shameful.

Instead, our far right has played partisan games to score cheap political points, threatening a government shutdown, and completely dismissing the very real fear that students and educators at UNLV and across the country feel each and every day.

That fear should not be normal. Nevadans are tired of it and so am I. I want my colleagues to work together to end this sick cycle of gun violence. Let's honor these victims with action.

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