Apalachee School Shooting
Floor Speech
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Mr. WARNOCK. Mr. President, I rise today carrying the grief of all Georgians after a school shooting in the small town of Winder, GA, claimed the lives of two children and two educators just 5 days ago.
I have been in the U.S. Senate a little over 3 years, and I have stood here three times to lament yet another tragic mass shooting in my State alone that has taken innocent lives. That is as unsurprising as it is tragic since we endure, in this country, about two mass shootings a day.
So here we are again. I stand here not just as a Senator but as a father of two young children. I can tell you that as a dad, that time in the morning when you get your kids ready for school and you put them in the car and you drive them to school--that is precious time. All of us parents, when we drop our kids off--we drive them to school or walk them to school or walk them to the schoolbus--we want to know that we are going to pick them up just a few hours later. It is a ritual played out in small towns and big cities all across America, and it is something we take for granted. But increasingly in the United States of America, we cannot take for granted that when we drop our kids off in the morning, we will pick them up at 3 o'clock. That is every parents' nightmare regardless of your politics.
Only weeks into the new school year, this nightmare again became a reality in Georgia. With four dead, others injured, and an entire community traumatized, Apalachee High School joins a grim and growing procession of schools where our children are dying from gun violence.
We cannot easily pass this over. We must never forget their names: two dedicated educators, Cristina Irimie and Richard--or Coach Ricky, as he was called--Aspinwall, and then two young students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.
On Friday night, this past Friday night, I went to Winder to join Apalachee students, families, and community members as they came together to mourn these precious souls. It was a Friday night in smalltown Georgia. The truth is, we should have been there for a football game--how I remember those nights as a high school student-- but instead of cheering on their classmates, they were mourning their classmates.
One student came up to me with pain in her eyes, and she said, ``I don't want to go back to school.'' Then there were these girls, these 15-year-old girls, who surrounded me, because I spent some time there, and they began to talk to me. One of them talked about hearing the noise of someone banging on the door, of huddling and wondering what would come next.
Coach Ricky, who was beloved, was also a math teacher, and one of the girls said: This was my math teacher. Imagine that. You go to school one day, and the biggest thing you are concerned about is understanding the math problem, and you come to school the next day, the next week, and your math teacher is dead--another victim of a mass shooting in your school.
I remember talking also to the family of Christian, and the father shared with me that they had moved from California to a small town in Georgia looking for a quiet and peaceful life. Sad irony. Tragic irony.
One of my colleagues suggested over the weekend--one of my Senate colleagues--that this kind of violence is a fact of life. That is what he said. He said it is a fact of life.
No. This is a fact of life in America. In no other country that is not at war is this kind of random violence routine. This is a tragic form of American exceptionalism.
As we wrestle with this trauma, I think we are all called as a country to ask ourselves, what trauma do we visit upon our children if we say that the only thing we can do for you in the midst of all of this is to teach you how to hide?
That same colleague, by the way, suggested that what we ought to do is harden the schools because these are soft targets. Well, apply that logic. So are we going to harden every school in America, harden every grocery store in America? What about shopping malls? What about spas? What about the medical clinics? What about the houses of worship? Is that the answer? Are we going to turn the whole country into a fort just so 14-year-olds can have AR-15s? So I know that we may not all agree on what to do, but surely we can do better than that. We don't have to live this way. We don't have to accept this as a fact of life.
So in the midst of all of this, we hear often the words, you know, ``We are sending our thoughts and our prayers.'' Let me say as a man of faith that to say that you are praying while refusing to act is to make a mockery of faith. We must pray with our lips, and we must pray by taking action.
I do not believe that mass shootings as routine are the cost of freedom; I believe that they are the cost of blind obstinance. They are the cost of greed.
So we must start and see through a serious, bipartisan conversation right here in Washington and in State capitals all over this country about how to better protect our children and communities across the country from the scourge of gun violence.
I was proud that a few years ago, just a couple years ago, we did make progress right here in this Chamber, and we passed commonsense gun safety reforms in the wake of yet another tragic school shooting. While that bill was modest, it was meaningful. We made progress. Right now, that law is saving lives but, as we were reminded just a few days ago, not enough. So there is still work for us to do.
For me, this is not a political issue; it is a moral issue. The glimmer of hope is that most American families feel the same way. According to a FOX News poll, about 87 percent of Americans believe that Congress ought to pass universal background checks. That is Democrats and Republicans--87 percent agreement. Still we can't have a serious conversation about that here in this Chamber. Why? Because politicians have put their own political ambitions--their own fears in some cases--ahead of the people we were sent here to represent. It is just another sign of the growing chasm between what the people want and what they can get out of their government. In that sense, it is a democracy problem.
So we have to save the American people from this carnage, and we have to redeem the democracy. We must do more, and I believe in our ability to do more because I believe in the American people. The American people are calling for change--Democrats and Republicans, folks in rural spaces and in urban spaces. It is the gun lobby that wants to turn this into a culture war because they know that is in their best interest.
This is a public safety issue, and the American people are calling out for action, they are calling for sanity, and I believe it is high time that we do that work.
As I close, I just want to thank our law enforcement officers. I want to thank our first responders and our healthcare workers. May we thank our educators, our teachers, our coaches. May we remember the people of Winder and Apalachee High School and small towns all across our country. They all stood up the other day, shining bright in a dark moment. I pray for the day when I will be able to say the same thing about the U.S. Congress. It is past time.
As dark as this moment is, may we be encouraged by the words of Scripture:
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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