Fourth Anniversary of the Tops Supermarket Shooting in Buffalo, New York

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from New York for putting this together today. I thank the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and the Congressional Black Caucus for joining in as well in support of this effort.

The tragedy in Buffalo, unfortunately, is not a rare event. As you just heard from my colleague, 10 people were gunned down using an assault weapon that had been sold to an 18-year-old, an AR-15 that had been modified. He gunned them down in cold blood, and he drove 200 miles to get to them because he wanted to kill African Americans. I guess that was the closest he could get to find them, and that is what he did that day.

He had been inspired, sadly, by another similar type of shooting, a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, just a few years before at the Mother Emanuel Church. In fact, my colleague from New York and I had a chance to go visit there just a few months ago, where nine people were gunned down. The person had come into the church, sat through Bible study with the African Americans that he later gunned down, and killed nine of them.

I know the question that we have now. We had a long list of these that happened on such a regular basis that sometimes people are numbed by it, forget to keep track of it. It is a sad day that we have reached from that standpoint.

A version of that too that I heard the other day in the hallways here is the shooting that took place at the hotel where President Trump was about to speak. One of the things that the person remarked to me was that the older people were scared by the gunfire, but the younger folks were not. I kind of wondered about that. Then I thought about it, and I said: Well, this is the generation that has grown up, and instead of doing fire drills, they have done active shooting drills. They have been trained tragically in what to do when you hear gunfire like that.

Schools now sell bulletproof backpacks to protect kids--``protect kids''--from this kind of gun violence and bulletproof chalkboards. Think about that. How did we get to this place?

Then the next question, of course, is: How do we get out of it? We have talked a little bit about some of the solutions to gun violence. I have got to say that my Republican colleagues, sadly, are not in support of nearly any of them that I am aware of. The ghost gun piece, in particular, was a shock for me. Ghost guns, as you may know, are untraceable guns. The only reason somebody would want a gun that is untraceable is if you want to commit a crime and you want to make sure that law enforcement cannot find you.

Why these guns would be legal is beyond me, but there was a period where they were. We couldn't pass legislation to ban them, so the Biden administration reached out to the ATF, which passed a regulation that did ban them. The Trump Supreme Court, to my surprise, upheld that regulation.

I thought, well, maybe it is a new day. Yesterday, in the Committee on Appropriations, I am sorry to say, my Republican colleagues passed language that would repeal the ban on ghost guns. The sad thing about it is I think they were trying to do it sort of in the cover of dark because they didn't offer an actual piece of legislation that would have hearings and the like to do the same, because they would have to stand up and defend it there, so they just tried to slip this in.

This is a tragic moment, I think, given all of the deaths, all of the killings, all of the murders that we have seen year after year and now decade after decade here in the United States.

I also would add this. We found some things that do work. You heard about the assault weapons ban. I know that is a bridge too far for many of my Republican colleagues--I guess all of them actually, because none of them will even cosponsor legislation like that. I put together a bill that is called Raise the Age, and it would raise the age from 18 to 21 to buy an assault-style weapon. It is already required that you be 21 to buy handguns, and that was a bill that was put in place by the Ronald Reagan administration.

I thought maybe we can get some support for this. There was not one Republican cosponsor for that bill. The shooter in Buffalo was 18 years old, and he bought the gun by himself without anybody to monitor it. The shooter in Charleston, he was 21, but he should have been caught by the background check. He slipped through, though, because it was underfunded and they didn't have enough people to make sure they caught and did all of the checks. Even though he should have been flagged and he was, they didn't have the bodies to do the follow through. He got the gun, and we know what he did after that.

Then, lastly, on this point, some of the things that we found that also work is not just enforcement. It is also intervention and prevention. We found grants that help with violence in the street, to reduce it. They help by reaching young people before they get too deep into trouble or help to get them out before they get too far along with it. But the Trump administration has cut 400 of those grants worth $815 million. The funds that would be used to help prevent street violence or, even worse, gun violence in our schools has been cut back.

I say this on this day of remembrance: I call upon all of my colleagues--I know we don't agree on everything. In fact, we don't agree on a lot, but let's see if we can find a solution to this. My Republican colleagues want to protect the Second Amendment. That is great, but we have got to be able to find a way to protect the Second Amendment and protect second-graders at the same time. Let's get this done. Let's get this done.

Mr. KENNEDY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Ivey very much for his remarks.

Kelly).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source