Agricultural Act of 2014
Floor Speech
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Madam President, since the failure of the gun bill on the floor of the Senate, I have tried to come to the floor every week or so to talk about the voices of the thousands of victims who have died from gun violence all across this country. About 30 people a day--not even counting suicides--die from gun violence. It is a travesty, it is a tragedy, it is a scourge on our country, and it is inflicting pain in our cities, in our suburbs, and the Senate and the House of Representatives--the most deliberative, the most representative bodies in the history of the world--are doing absolutely nothing about it.
If you want to know why it continues, we can give a long list of reasons. There is no one panacea to solve the problem of gun violence. It is about tightening our gun laws. It is about better mental health programming, more funding. It is about addressing a culture of violence. But it is also about a signal that we send here, a signal of complicity.
Our silence essentially sends a message to young men and women all across this country that we must be OK, we must be all right with epidemic levels of gun violence if the numbers continue to spiral upwards and we do absolutely nothing about it.
The statistics alone tell you we should step to the plate and change our laws, address the problem, give new resources. But seeing that those numbers and that data have not really moved the Senate to action, maybe the voices of the victims will.
A lot of attention here in the greater Washington area was paid to a seemingly random shooting without apparent motive in a suburban Maryland mall on Saturday, January 25.
A gunman came in, a 19-year-old with a shotgun, and sprayed bullets into a Zumiez store, which is a store that sells clothing and merchandise for skateboarders and snowboarders.
He killed Brianna Benlolo and Tyler Johnson, two people he apparently had no connection to.
Brianna was 21 years old, and she left behind a little 2-year-old boy Elijah. Her friends who worked at the mall with her said Brianna was "really proud of her job.'' They spoke about how positive she was. One friend said "she never seemed like she had any negativity.'' She left behind a little notebook that she had filled with fanciful drawings and phrases from pop culture. She was a really, really happy young woman who was raising a really, really happy little boy. Little 2-year-old Elijah is never going to get to see his mother again because of a seemingly random, unprovoked act of violence in another mass shooting.
Tyler Johnson had had a tough life. He had had a history of substance abuse. But he had been clean from drugs and alcohol for 2 years, and he had pretty much completely turned his life around. He was working, earning a paycheck at this store at the mall. But then, after work, he had become a board member at a local 12-step recovery house called the Serenity Center in Columbia, and he was now all about the business of mentoring other young people to make sure they would not fall into the same cycle of abuse of drugs and alcohol that he had.
The president of Serenity Center said:
I thought he was a remarkable young man. I don't see a lot of young people stepping up like that. I just thought he was an up-and-coming leader.
We are desperate in this country to have these kinds of role models such as Tyler Johnson--somebody who had struggled with dependence and had not only conquered it for himself but then had gone out and set himself about being a role model.
The difference that Tyler Johnson could have made--Tyler was 25 years old. Tyler was not even halfway through his life, and he had decided he was going to spend his life turning people's lives around. He had decided he was going to go back and get a degree that would help him become a counselor for young people.
We lost maybe 50 years of life transformations because Tyler Johnson is gone. Tyler Johnson was going to help turn kids' lives around, to get them back on the straight and narrow path like he did, but we do not get that benefit any longer because of another mass shooting at a Maryland mall.
When you read these obituaries and horrific newspaper articles about shooting after shooting, as I have since I became so personally connected to this issue in the wake of the shooting in Sandy Hook that took Dylan Hockley's life and Daniel Barden's life and Jesse Lewis's life and Ben Wheeler's life, you see how casual the violence is. Chad Oulson lost his life on January 13 of this year in Wesley Chapel, FL.
Chad was going to see a new movie. I have not seen it, but I have heard it is pretty good: "Lone Survivor.'' He was texting his 3-year-old daughter, as the previews were playing. One of the movie patrons did not like the fact that Chad was texting during the previews of the movie. So he confronted Chad about it. They had an argument. They had an altercation. This guy left the theater to go get a security guard. When he returned, he came back alone. He took out a gun, and he shot Chad.
Chad was struck in the chest and died. His wife was hit in the hand and suffered injuries. An off-duty police officer and two nurses who happened to be in the theater ensured there were no more shots fired. They tried to resuscitate Chad until the paramedics arrived.
His family members said he was just a good all-around guy. He was the father of a beautiful little girl--a girl he was texting with at the time of his murder. "You'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who didn't like him,'' somebody said. "He was a friend to everybody, whoever he met.''
Two days later, in Dallas, TX, Trinidad Salazar was killed over a dispute about roof shingles. There was a dispute as to whether he owned these shingles or whether another guy owned the shingles, and this 38-year-old guy decided the best way to resolve the dispute over who owned these roof shingles was to shoot 33-year-old Trinidad Salazar. A .40 caliber Glock pistol was pulled out. He fired one warning shot into the ground, and then fired one shot directly into Trinidad, and Trinidad, at 30 years old, is no longer with us.
The casualness and the randomness of this gun violence makes it even harder to take. It is not that you can ever defend this kind of carnage. But when no one can see it coming, when it becomes the result of simple arguments over housing materials or nuisances in movie theaters or items of clothing, it just makes it even more absurd that we do not step to the plate and do something about it.
In 2013--the year after Sandy Hook happened--we paid even more attention to school shootings. So when one came across our transom, when we saw evidence or reports of shootings on TV, we all paid attention. Over the course of 2013, there were 28 school shootings. Madam President, 28 school shootings happened in 2013--the year after Sandy Hook. That is a lot.
We are 28 days into 2014, and in those 28 days we have had 11 school shootings. We had 28 in all of 2013. We have had 11 school shootings in just the first month of 2014 alone. We are on pace--we are on pace--to have over 120 school shootings this year.
On January 9, in Jackson, TN; on January 13, in New Haven, CT; on January 14, in Roswell, NM; on January 17, in Philadelphia, PA; on January 17, in Albany, GA; on January 20, at Widener University; on January 21, at Purdue University; again on January 21, at Wakefield Elementary, in Turlock, CA; on January 24, at South Carolina State University; on January 27, in Carbondale, IL; on January 28, in Honolulu, HI--luckily, each one of them--"luckily,'' that is a terrible word to use--in each one of these school shootings there have only been one or two or three people shot or injured. But it is just a matter of time before there is another Sandy Hook. When you are having school shootings at the rate of one every two school days, it is just a matter of time before somebody continues to pull that trigger over and over or someone does not intervene as quickly as they intervened in these situations.
If we do not recognize the trend that is developing, if we do not at least send a message that the Senate and the House do not condone with our silence these acts, then it will just continue to happen.
I am not suggesting that there is a magical act of Congress that we can pass that is going to end gun violence in this country or, frankly, that is going to stop people with deep psychological illnesses from walking into malls and churches and schools occasionally and firing weapons.
But we can take steps to make sure it does not happen as often. We can take steps to make sure the carnage is not as bad or as significant when someone decides to walk into a crowded place and do that kind of damage. That is within our power. That is something on which Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree.
I will continue to come down to the floor to tell the stories of the voices of the victims until we can find the ability to reach across party lines and do something to at least send a message that the Senate stands against the developing, awful, terrible trend of mass violence in this country.
I yield the floor.
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