Assault Weapons Ban

ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I believe I have 4 minutes, which I very much appreciate and I want to thank my colleague from California for yielding the time and for her tremendous and unstinting leadership on this very important issue.

If nothing happens, AK-47s, Uzis, and TEC-9s are going to be back on the streets next week. That is a giant step backward. It is hard to believe that with all the progress we have made in the fight on crime, with the reduction in crime, with the reduction in the number in law enforcement who are hurt and killed in the line of duty, with the new war on terrorism upon us, that we are going to make it easy for anybody to get an AK-47, provided they have not been convicted of a felony. Someone on a terrorist watch list will be able to walk into a store and get an AK-47.

What is going on in America? This should not be a contest. This bill should have been renewed without a debate. Everyone who studied it has agreed it has been broadly successful. This President and the previous four, from Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, are on record as being for this, and because of a small band of people who are ideologues, who are extreme, we are not going to see this happen.

This represents the dysfunction of American politics. When a country cannot deal with an issue in a straightforward, forthright way, when a country that has had success takes a step back because a narrow few have some ideological notion that everyone should be entitled to have any weapon they want-some of them even believe a bazooka or a tank is okay-then something is wrong.

We need some leadership. We need the President of the United States to ask the House of Representatives to vote on the bill. We have not heard a peep out of him. We need some leadership from the leadership of the House to allow the bill to be on the floor. The crime bill of 1994, for all the "sturm und drang," was one of the great governmental successes of the last decade.

As we wrote it, our motto in that bill was tough on punishment and smart on prevention. We brought a grand coalition from the most liberal to the most conservative to deal with the scourge of crime. The only reason there is not much of a fuss on this issue, regrettably, is because we have succeeded, because crime rates are lower and the large impetus to do more has declined because of our success.

When one has success, the answer is not to undo that success. It is to continue what has been done, and we are not. It is a sign, in my judgment, of the weakness of our politics, and even of this Republic, that the Senator from California and I are on the floor today as the gates are closing, pleading with our President and our colleagues to allow a vote to occur. This is not the America of which we should be proud.

I yield the floor.