Money Does't Buy Respect

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PERRY. First I want to say thank you for your service as a Member of this body who has also served his Nation in uniform. Thank you, and how well you know and what you just spoke of.

I found it fascinating, on my most recent deployment to Iraq--it has been years now--we were mobilized to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I am sure you know it well. So you carry your weapon around with you 24 hours a day in your training because you must always be prepared, except--this is the fascinating part--except when you go to the PX, except when you go to the chow hall. Then you must find a place for your weapon. You must leave a soldier out in the parking lot to guard all the weapons, or what have you. And I am thinking to myself: Here I am, a commander of this task force. I have got men and women of all ages and all different backgrounds, and we are training and refining ourselves to go to war, to fight the enemy, to defend our Nation in arms, wearing your ballistic vest and all your gear, wearing a ballistic helmet so that if you do get shot, you are protected from that fire. But yet I am not trusted to carry my firearm on a military base.

So what we have seen during this administration is this horrific incident, the previous one with Nidal Hasan, and nothing has really changed. And now we see a repeat of it. Meanwhile, soldiers--men and women who are willing and ready to serve their country--are left defenseless and can't even turn to their own Constitution, which they take an oath to uphold and defend to protect them.

I find it the height of the dereliction of duty of this body and of this administration.

Mr. GOHMERT. During the time that my friend was in the military, what weapons were you required to qualify using?

Mr. PERRY. Well, as an officer, I qualified with a .9 millimeter, but of course everybody qualifies at some point M16, or an M4 now.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PERRY. If the gentleman would yield, I am just curious--you have spent more time here than I have--what was the impetus for the current law which restricts DOD and commanders, as an installation commander myself, from exacting our own authority based on the Constitution?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PERRY. Who is better trained than the United States military, the different branches serving on those bases and posts all around the country, all around the world, dealing with weapons on a daily basis, dealing with ammunition and its effects on a daily basis? Most of what you do revolves around ranges, firing, qualifications because we train. Readiness is important, and using the tools of the trade; whether you like it or not, they are weapons, because there are bad actors out there. And that is what they have to use to be able to fight back.

So that is the one place, specifically the one place on the planet where you would think that people would be able to. As you said, they are trained, are prepared, are knowledgeable, are familiar, are comfortable with. And yet this United States Government does not allow them to defend themselves and, more importantly, the oath and the very Constitution, the set of rules with which we govern this Nation.

When you raise your right hand and take that solemn oath, unfortunately under the current paradigm, under this current administration, when you take the oath to join the military, you are giving away the right to defend yourself while you are on a military base.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PERRY. Certainly you and I can both attest to this. It is a sensitive, it is a controlled item. And from day one, you learn the very harsh reality that you do not ever, ever misplace your weapon. There are very serious penalties for misplacing your weapon. You learn to live with it, to sleep with it, to shower with it. It is you, and you are it. You are together at all times and all things. And accountability is paramount. That is what I mean. There can be no breach of this standard. And there is none. And the military trains you in that very acutely.

So, once again, I would say, there is no place where individuals--men and women--are more familiar, better trained, and more well equipped to deal with firearms than in the military, especially--specifically on a military base.

Mr. GOHMERT. I was talking with one of our Capitol Police yesterday after this shooting at Fort Hood, again. One of our great Capitol Police. We are so blessed with such great qualified protectors of the Capitol area. And he was in the military for 13 years and left the military and became a Capitol policeman. Well, I trust that gentleman now to have a weapon at all times. I am delighted if he will carry a weapon at all times.

But Washington, D.C., has these really well-intentioned laws. Let's eliminate weapons in Washington, D.C. They have been struck down by the Supreme Court because they are unconstitutional. But I want somebody like that, that I could trust, whether he was still in the military, as he was, or as a Capitol policeman. I am very comfortable with him carrying a weapon and feel better knowing that there were people like him around carrying weapons.

So when that question was asked, what has the military done since 2009's Fort Hood mass shooting to prevent this kind of thing from happening, I know that the military cannot do any more than the Commander in Chief orders them to do. I don't know of anything that the Commander in Chief has done, as the commander, where the buck stops, to provide more protection from an incident like as now happened again.

If the gentleman knows of anything that has been done.

Mr. PERRY. I do not. And I thank you for asking. But just thinking about it, the process by which a person joins and maintains the attendance, so to speak, in the military requires an investigation of your person, of your background, who you are, your capabilities, and so on and so forth. And for an administration, rightly so, very concerned about background checks and making sure that only those in our free country avail themselves of their Second Amendment right and not those who shouldn't, such as criminals, who would also not be allowed to either join the military or stay in the military, once again, I would say, there is no safer, no better a place than on a military base because all those folks have been vetted, have been checked, do carry a weapon.

So I find it interesting that maybe the military, maybe DOD has made a recommendation to the administration and said, part of the solution to Nidal Hasan and his heinous acts are to make sure that people can defend themselves, soldiers, servicemembers at different bases and different branches of the services can protect themselves under force of arms, if necessary, on base. But that has yet to be found out.

But it would be very interesting to know if DOD did make that recommendation and nothing was done about it, and nothing was done about it. If there was no cry from the administration to say, hey, Congress, this is a problem. Here is part of the solution set. Get to work.

As you said, we have already gotten to work on that here. But I suspect that that bill--well-intentioned, the right thing to do--will make it out of the House in due course but under this Senate and under this administration will languish. That is what my suspicion will be.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PERRY. I agree with you on your assessment. I hope you are right about that. I hope you are right, that we accomplish something. It would be great if it wasn't partisan, if we could just do the right thing and allow people who have agreed to serve and take the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution to then have the same protections of that Constitution availed to themselves. And that would be, in my opinion, the right thing to do regardless--regardless--of your party.

So I would hope that we would see that now, see that as a solution set to--look, on this current case, it appears that when confronted with a firearm, this individual who carried out this most recent crime and these atrocities at Fort Hood, when confronted with a firearm himself, that is when the carnage ended.

So it seems to me that maybe it won't stop it, but it certainly can mitigate it, and maybe if these folks in the future that would ponder such an act, if they knew that other members on post would be carrying, as well, they might be reluctant to do the same thing.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source