Drug Quality and Security Act-- Motion to Proceed-- Continued
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
GUN VIOLENCE
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we have been trying to figure out all day how to fit five numbers on this poster. I have been bringing it down nearly every week since the anti-gun violence bill failed here in the Senate due to a Republican filibuster, and this is the first week this poster comes down to the floor of the Senate with five digits. There have been 10,287 Americans killed by guns since December 14, the day of the Sandy Hook shooting.
What I have been endeavoring to do since the failure of that bill on the floor of the Senate--despite the fact that 80 to 90 percent of Americans supported the bill--is to bring to the floor the voices of victims, because the statistics are numbing at this point. We have had 10,000 people in this country die at the hands of gun violence since December 14, and that apparently has not been enough to move this place, or the House of Representatives, to action.
My hope is that by coming down to this floor every week or so and telling the real stories--the human stories--about the individuals who have lost their lives and the absolutely catastrophic runoff of trauma that happens to a family and a neighborhood and a community when you lose a loved one due to gun violence, maybe that will move this place to do something.
I want to tell three stories this afternoon because it now is kind of routine--you just sort of wonder what day of the week is it going to be when you turn on CNN or look at your Twitter feed and you see ``active shooting in progress,'' ``school lockdown,'' or ``people fleeing airport.'' It just kind of happens every week now. It has become a kind of commonplace occurrence. It is almost like raindrops in the background of news coverage on a daily basis--this week's shooting, next week's shooting.
On October 21, a seventh grader named Jose Reyes, a student at Sparks Middle School, opened fire with a handgun he took from his parents. He killed a teacher, himself, and left two other students wounded at a middle school in Nevada.
The teacher he killed was named Mike Landsberry, and, boy, you don't get much more American than Mike Landsberry. He was an Alabama native. He graduated from high school in Reno, which is right next door to Sparks, in 1986, and then served in the Marine Corps. He joined the Air National Guard after he got out of the Marine Corps. He rose to the rank of master sergeant and served as a cargo specialist in Kuwait and Afghanistan. He fought for this country. He put his life on the line to defend this Nation. When he came back, as happens with thousands of veterans, he decided to continue his public service and became an incredibly popular math teacher.
His brother said of Mike: He is ``the kind of person that if someone needed help he would be there. He loved teaching. He loved the kids. He loved coaching them ..... He was just a good all-around individual.''
Mike is no longer with us because he is now one of the over 10,000 Americans who have died at the hands of a gun--this time in a school shooting on October 21.
Gerardo Hernandez, according to his wife, was always excited to go to work. He was a joyful person who took pride in his duty for the American public. Gerardo was the TSA screener at the Los Angeles International Airport who was gunned down when Paul Ciancia, a troubled 23-year-old, walked into LAX with an assault weapon and a grievance and grudge against the government. He opened fire and killed Gerardo Hernandez, age 39. He was the youngest in a family of four boys who had all emigrated from El Salvador. He was 15 years old when they made the decision to come to the United States to seek a better, safer, more stable life. And now the youngest of four boys is one of 10,287.
Finally, the story of Maria Flores, who, frankly, didn't make headlines when she died over the summer along with her daughter Elizabeth Gomez. They died in Las Vegas when Manuel Mata, her boyfriend with a history of jealousy and domestic violence, shot and killed Maria. He shot and killed her teenaged daughter and wounded a 4-year-old before turning the gun on himself.
Family members said that Mata had financial troubles, drank often, displayed jealousy, and constantly accused his girlfriend of cheating. They said his girlfriend Maria Flores, who died that day, threatened to move out of the residence a couple of weeks earlier, but she was convinced by Mata to stay.
The daughter who was killed was scheduled to graduate 3 days after the murder took place.
I tell these three stories for this reason: First, in the wake of the TSA shooting, a lot of folks from the gun lobby made the argument that the way to fix this problem was to arm TSA agents, just as people made the argument that the way to guarantee another Sandy Hook tragedy from happening is to arm the teachers. Some people actually had the audacity to argue that an even better way was to arm the students too.
It speaks to this sort of new philosophy that has infested this place--the Senate and the House--that I kind of describe as gun control Darwinism, the idea that if everybody has a gun--the good guys and the bad guys--hopefully enough of the good guys will shoot the bad guys. You just throw a whole mess load of guns out there, let them figure it out, and in the end we will take care of the bad guys.
We have some new data that tells us how backwards that philosophy is. Common sense tells you that is not a good idea, but the data now tells you that is not a good idea.
The American Journal of Public Health did the most comprehensive study ever done in this country. They looked at rates of gun ownership and rates of homicide by gun death. They looked at decades of data across every State in the Nation, and then they had the common sense to account for about every factor you could think of: gender, race, poverty, income, education, alcohol use, and crime rates. What they found is pretty stunning and straightforward. The American Journal of Public Health said that for every 1 percent increase in gun ownership in a particular State, locality, or geographic region, there is a firearms homicide rate increase of 1 percent, a 1-to-1 ratio. If gun ownership goes up by 1 percent, increases in gun homicide go up by 1 percent.
Police chiefs in city after city across the country will verify that. As they have taken guns off the street, as they have engaged in gun buyback programs, guess what. Miraculously gun deaths decrease. That is not to say the only thing that matters is the number of guns on the street.
Clearly, this young man who walked into Sparks Middle School and the 23-year-old who walked into LAX had enormous issues that were going untreated. We are fooling ourselves if any of us are trying to perpetuate an argument that this is just about gun ownership. This is also about a very broken mental health system that we need to address. But a 1-percent increase in gun ownership leads to a 1-percent increase in gun violence.
The reason I tell Maria's story is because this is Domestic Violence Awareness Month--or maybe it was October. We have either completed it or we are in that month. Here is a stunning fact: In States that have comprehensive background checks, women are 38 percent less likely to die from domestic violence crimes. Women are 38 percent less likely to die from domestic violence crimes if they are lucky enough to live in a State that says: Before you buy a gun, you have to prove to us you are not a domestic abuser.
Since 1998, 250,000 domestic abusers have been stopped from buying guns because of background check laws. That is just the domestic abusers who were dumb enough to show up at a gun store and try to buy a firearm. That doesn't count, frankly, the millions of domestic abusers who never walked into the store to buy the gun in the first place because they knew they were going to be denied. Women in the United States are 11 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in any other high-income Nation. And we have a solution: background checks. Women are 40 percent less likely to die from domestic violence if they live in a State that does background checks.
I bring just three stories to the floor today in my effort to bring voices to the victims--the stories of Mike, a teacher in Nevada; Gerardo, an immigrant to this country who loved doing his public service as a TSA screener; and Maria Flores, one of thousands of women across this country killed by their spouses or partners in part because of the ease of access to a gun in this country.
So 10,287 people--that number is tough to fit on one board. That is just in 11 months. Frankly, it won't be that long--just a handful of years fro
m now--before there is absolutely no way to fit this number on this board unless the Senate and the House of Representatives decide that 90 percent of Americans are right and we should make sure criminals can't access guns. We should ban illegal gun trafficking. We should expand the reach of our mental health system so we can finally say that Congress--the Senate and the House--is going to do something to give voice to these victims.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source