NICS Improvement Act and Leahy-Schumer Amendment

Floor Speech

NICS IMPROVEMENT ACT AND LEAHY-SCHUMER AMENDMENT

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise to speak about H.R. 2640--it is called the NICS Improvement Act--and the Leahy-Schumer amendment.

I have worked long and hard on this bill. It has been a long time in coming. Now it is time to get it passed. To put it simply, the young man who was behind the great tragedy at Virginia Tech had a long history of mental illness but still fell through the cracks of our checking systems and bought guns and ammunition.

It is against the law for someone with serious mental illness to buy a gun. When the system fails, we are all less safe. This bill will get desperately needed resources to the States to help improve our Federal background check process. This bill will make it harder for someone to get lost in the system.

We cannot wait any longer before passing this commonsense piece of legislation. We cannot sit back and watch another Virginia Tech shooting happen without doing everything we can to stop it.

I have worked hard on this bill for more than a decade and the background check system to which it is added. In 2002, Representative CAROLYN MCCARTHY and I introduced legislation similar to what I am discussing today. It was in response to another senseless shooting. This one was at Our Lady of Peace Church, in our State, in Lynbrook, on Long Island. That was where someone with a long history of mental illness bought a gun, walked into Our Lady of Peace Church, killed Father Lawrence Penzes and a long-time parishioner, Eileen Tosner.

So back then we introduced a bill to get money to the States to help them get important records--on mental illness, convictions, things such as that--into the NICS system. But because of the climate of mistrust on all sides of the gun issue, that bill was never passed into law. I believe it passed the House once. I believe it passed the Senate once. But the two never hooked up.

Now, here we are again. It saddens me that it has taken this long--it has been years since Our Lady of Peace; it has been 5 months since Virginia Tech--to move the debate forward and try to get something done about safety on our streets and college campuses.

Now we are so close. The House has passed similar legislation that went through with the support of both the NRA and the Brady Campaign. That does not happen too often. As you know, when the NRA and I agree on an issue, there is a good chance some good can come of it.

We already have a comprehensive background check system, but since the system relies on up-to-date computer searches to produce fast results, it is only as good as the automated information the States provide. That is why the focus of the bill is to get more records into the system. So under the bill, States that opt into the system that do well will be rewarded with grants and financial incentives. States that do not will be punished.

We have modified that so smaller States that have more difficulty keeping the records because they have smaller budgets will not be penalized. Senator Leahy correctly insisted that be done to protect his State of Vermont. But it affects smaller States as well. The amendments Senator Leahy has suggested and been added to this bill, I believe, improve it without getting any of our delicately balanced coalition out of kilter in any way. So I thank Senator Leahy for doing that.

Perhaps the most important thing I can say about this bill is it is all about public safety. It is all about enforcing the laws on the books. This is not--and this is important--is not a gun control bill. No lawful gun owners are going to have their guns taken away. Nobody who should be allowed to get a gun will have his or her rights restricted.

The bill targets only those records that are supposed to be in the system already--records that demonstrate whether someone is seriously mentally ill, a felon, or so on. What Virginia Tech showed us is when the background check system fails, the consequences can be terribly tragic.

Congresswoman CAROLYN MCCARTHY and I saw that in Long Island and, of course, the Nation saw it at Virginia Tech. Nothing can bring back the 33 young people who died last April, and we do not know if we can prevent another Virginia Tech from happening, but our bill will take a substantial step toward making the system better and keeping our streets and schools safer.

I yield the floor.

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