Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I begin by noting that the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator from Oregon have a common thread that runs between our two States. That common thread that runs between Connecticut and Oregon is that our two States have been the sites of two very deadly school shootings. At Sandy Hook in Connecticut, it was in mid-December 2012 when a madman armed for a war zone stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began a murderous rampage--a rampage that ended with the death of 6 school staff and 20 little boys and girls.

Not even 3 years later, a nightmare came to Roseburg, OR. Roseburg is a quiet little town in southern Oregon. It is the town where I spent part of my childhood. It is a town where I went to first grade. It is a town where I learned to swim in the Umpqua River. As I said last October, if this can happen in Roseburg, it can happen anywhere. But happen in Roseburg it did. It was October 1, 2015. It was a beautiful autumn morning in the small town. There on the college campus we heard the sound of gunfire. A disturbed individual charged into a classroom at Umpqua Community College with six guns, and within the space of just a couple of minutes, he took nine lives, including his own. One of the lives he took was a cousin of mine, Rebecka Ann Carnes. Eighteen years old, she had just graduated from South Umpqua High School the previous June. She was an avid hunter. She was a lover of four-wheeling. In the picture she posted online for graduation, she was holding her graduation cap, which said on it: ``And so the adventure begins.'' She was ready for the adventure of adulthood. She was ready for the adventure of going off to college. She was ready to explore the world. She was excited. She was a beautiful spirit. But her adventure ended so shortly after graduating from high school, before she could really get started on the journey of the balance of life.

Our hearts break for Sandy Hook, our hearts break for Roseburg, and our hearts break for all those who are afflicted day after day after day all across this country as victims of gun violence. Now our hearts break for Orlando, the latest name to be added to a list that no town or city ever wants to join. In that occasion, 49 innocent were lives taken--49 young Americans full of hope and promise--and 49 individuals, each with their own story, were cut down simply because of who they are, whom they loved, or whom they associated with.

A hate-filled individual targeted a place that was a sanctuary for the LGBT community. He turned this place of solidarity, togetherness, and love into a place of fear, divisiveness, hatred, and bloodshed.

This unthinkable carnage leaves Congress--all of us here, all of us here in the Senate--with a choice. It is a simple choice. We have two basic options. One option is to take some action that might diminish the odds of the next Sandy Hook or the next Umpqua or the next Orlando or the next assault--the type of assault that takes place day in and day out across this Nation. The second option is to do nothing. That is where we are. Option one is take some action--take some reasonable action. There is no perfect answer. But there are substantial things that could make a difference. It will not make a difference in every case; it will make a difference in some cases. Isn't that the case with every law we consider? It will make a difference, at least part of the time, to avert a tragedy.

I come from a gun State. I come from the beautiful State of Oregon, the best State in the United States of America, where people love to hunt. They love to target practice. They believe powerfully in the individual rights of the Second Amendment. But Oregon is also a State where the citizens believe that we should not put guns into the hands of felons or those who are deeply mentally disturbed.

It was in the year 2000 that Measure 5 was put on the ballot as a citizen initiative--and it passed overwhelmingly in the State of Oregon--to expand background checks to gun shows. The citizens did that in an initiative at the ballot. It is a State where our legislature took action just last year in Senate bill 941, the Oregon Firearms Safety Act, to close the Craigslist loophole.

Why does this make so much sense? If you keep a terrorist from buying a gun at a gun shop, shouldn't you also keep that terrorist from buying a gun at a gun show? Shouldn't you also keep that terrorist from buying a gun out of the classifieds or the online classifieds, the Craigslist classifieds? Yes, of course. Each piece of this makes sense to keep guns out of the hands of felons or those who are deeply mentally disturbed.

In Oregon, folks believe that people should buy their guns legally with a background check and that process shouldn't be averted through straw purchasers subverting the law by putting a different name than the name of the person who is actually acquiring the weapon.

Hunters and target shooters in Oregon know you don't need a military- grade, super-sized magazine to go hunting, and smaller magazine sizes may give an opportunity to interrupt a killer during his shooting spree. When you hunt for ducks, you are allowed three shells in the gun--one in the chamber and two in the magazine.

My question for the Senator from Connecticut is this: When will Congress finally say enough is enough? How many lives have to be lost in one shooting for Congress to act? When will Congress join with responsible gun owners across this country and support commonsense steps to prevent horrific tragedies? When will we close the terrorist gun loophole? When will we close the gun show loophole? When will we close the Craigslist loophole?

As we have seen in Sandy Hook and as we have seen in Roseburg, and now as we have seen with Orlando, all too much tragedy has taken place.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to ask a question of my colleague from Connecticut.

Earlier I came to the floor and I was reflecting on the connection between Connecticut and Oregon in terms of the shooting in Sandy Hook and the shooting we had last year at Umpqua Community College, the 10 individuals who were killed at Umpqua Community College. But as I was pondering during the day, my head was going further back in time to 1998 when I was running for my first race for State legislature. Our primary was held May 19 of that year, and I was immersed in this primary. I was running a race against two former State representatives and the head of the water district, and I was the individual who had never run for office and never held office, and I assumed I would lose. But on May 19 when the results came in, I had won the primary.

Two days later, on May 21, a young man who had been expelled from his school--his name was Kip Kinkel--Thurston High School in Springfield, OR, took the guns from his house. He murdered his parents. He proceeded to go to Thurston High School. He had with him a 9mm Glock. He had a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle, he had a .22-caliber Mark II pistol, and he had 1,127 rounds of ammunition. His goal was to shoot as many students, to kill as many students as he could. He shot a lot of students. Two died and twenty-five were wounded. As he exhausted the ammunition in his semiautomatic rifle, he had to reload the magazine, and as he did that, he was tackled by one student who was already wounded, six others piled on, and the carnage ended. But he had only begun to tap into the 1,127 rounds of ammunition he was carrying. Thank goodness that individual, that student, Jacob Ryker, succeeded in stopping him when he was reloading that rifle.

The year went on. November was the general election. I was elected to the Oregon House. The Oregon House came into session in January of 1999, and we said: It is time to fix the background check system we have in our State. It is time to close the gun show loophole.

What makes no sense is to have this background check system when you go to a gun store and then no background check system when you go to a gun show. And we knew that many people who had felony backgrounds were seeking to acquire guns. We knew that many people who were deeply mentally disturbed were seeking weapons. They were being turned away at the gun store, and they were going to the gun show or they were going to the classifieds. So we tried to pass that bill to close that background loophole, the gun show loophole, and we failed. We could not muster the majority, just as this body has not been able to muster the majority to address the complete illogic of this situation.

Then the citizens of Oregon took this into their own hands. They petitioned for an initiative. They put it on the ballot, and the citizens of Oregon voted overwhelmingly--by a huge margin--they voted overwhelmingly to close the gun show loophole. But it would be many years later--not until 2015--that the legislature would take the additional step of closing the classified ads loophole, or the Craig's List loophole, as it is often called.

So in Oregon, if you go to a gun store or a gun show or to a Craig's List listing, you have to go through a background check. But someone who is turned away in Oregon can go to any of a number of States across our country, bypass that background check, buy those guns, and come back to our home State.

It makes no sense to have a national system without national effectiveness. And I so much appreciate my colleagues being here tonight to talk about this, to talk about the fact that those who are on a terrorist list should be on a list to deny guns, and that those who are denied guns--to have it effectively, you have to have a background check system.

My State is a State that loves guns. We are a State with incredible wilderness. People love to hunt. They love to target practice. They love to just shoot guns. And they love the Second Amendment and nature. But they voted for the background check system because they knew it didn't make sense to have guns in the hands of felons or deeply disturbed individuals because of the carnage that comes from that.

There is another story I wanted to share that is related to 1998. This story fast-forwards from the primary election in May to the general election in October, November. So it was as we were approaching that first Tuesday in November, the general election, which would be held November 3. The day was October 6, so roughly a month away--a month before--a young man named Matthew Wayne Shepard was offered a ride home by two other young men, Eric McKinney and Russell Henderson. They didn't give him a ride home. They took him out to a very rural area near Laramie, WY. They tied him to a fence because he was gay. They robbed him, they pistol-whipped him, they tortured him, and they left him there to die. It was 18 hours later that a bicyclist riding past saw this young man still tied to a fence. The bicyclist thought that Matthew Wayne Shepard was a scarecrow but went to investigate, realized it was a young man, and proceeded to get help. Matthew was extremely damaged. His skull was fractured, his brain stem absolutely inflamed. He never regained consciousness. He died six days later.

It was a hate crime that rocked the Nation. It was a hate crime that shocked the conscience. These crimes were happening with some regularity--these hate crimes against our LGBT community--but this one caught the attention of the Nation, and a bill was crafted, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. That bill was championed by my predecessor in office, Gordon Smith, but it didn't get passed until I came to the Senate in 2009--not because I came but because it took that long to build the support on the foundation that others had laid in the years before. So we passed that hate crimes act, but the hate crimes act doesn't stop the discrimination against the LGBT community. It doesn't stop the promotion of hate.

I am going to be submitting a resolution, and I thought I would read it tonight. It is a resolution that Senator Mark Kirk has agreed to cosponsor, that Senator Baldwin has agreed to cosponsor, that Senator Cory Booker has agreed to cosponsor, and I hope many others will join us in this. It says the following:

(1) Equal treatment and protection under the law is one of the most cherished constitutional principles of the United States of America.

(2) Laws in many parts of the country still fail to explicitly prohibit discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender . . . individuals.

The failure to actively oppose and prohibit discrimination leaves our LGBT individuals vulnerable based on who they are or whom they love; vulnerable to being evicted from their homes; vulnerable to being denied credit or other financial services; vulnerable to being refused basic services in public places, such as restaurants or shops, or terminated from employment or otherwise discriminated against in employment.

(4) To allow discrimination to persist is incompatible with the founding principles of this country.

(5) Failure to ensure that all people of the United States are treated equally allows a culture of hate against some people in the United States to fester.

(6) This hate culture includes continuing physical assaults and murders committed against LGBT individuals, and particularly against transgender individuals, in the United States.

(7) The events that transpired on June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Florida, were a horrifying and tragic act of hate and terror that took the lives of 49 innocent individuals and injured 53 more. The victims were targeted because of who they were, who they loved, or who they associated with.

(b) It is the sense of Congress that--

(1) it is time to end discrimination against LGBT individuals and stand against the culture of hatred and prejudice that such discrimination allows;

(2) it is incumbent on policymakers to ensure that LGBT individuals benefit from the full protection of the civil rights laws of the Nation; and

(3) Congress commits to take every action necessary to make certain that all people in the United States are treated and protected equally under the law.

That is the philosophy embedded in our Constitution--equal treatment and equal opportunity. It is the spirit of anti-discrimination that is our higher self that we should treat each individual with respect, each individual with dignity. It is the principle of opportunity for all that cannot take place when discrimination interferes. It is the spirit that we have carried along a long journey--a journey in which we have reached out to embrace individuals who were excluded.

Our original practices in this Nation operated under the vision of full opportunity for all, but it was a flawed vision. It was a vision that didn't include Native Americans. It was a vision that at that time didn't include individuals who were minorities. It was a vision that at that time didn't include women. But over time we have reached out and started to make that incredible picture portrayed in our founding documents and in the hearts of our Founders a reality. We have done so in step by step along an arc. It was Martin Luther King who said that ``the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.'' But that bending takes place because ordinary mortals say they are determined to make it happen. They apply themselves to that effort, whether in their everyday life with the individuals they encounter and work with and live with and worship with and recreate with or in the lives of legislators who work within their institutions to say: We are changing hearts, but let's change our laws as well.

We have the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a foundation, a milestone, an anchor, a foundation of laws against discrimination, but when you read the 1964 act, you don't see any protections for our LGBT community. Now many of us have put forward a law called the Equality Act that would remedy that, that would use the foundation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to extend full equality for the LGBT community.

It is unbelievable that today in America you can get married to someone you love in the morning and announce it in the afternoon and be fired from your job--legally fired from your job or evicted from your apartment before nightfall because your marriage demonstrates that you are gay or lesbian or transgender or bisexual. Some States have remedied that, but we haven't done it as a nation. And when you have a legal structure that embraces discrimination, that fosters a culture of discrimination among some. Let's end that. Let's end that structure of law. Let's pass the Equality Act.

I am sure it will be sometime before they call up the act in hearing in committee. That shouldn't be the case on something so profound, so important. It should have had a hearing right after it was introduced, and we will keep pushing for that hearing. We hope it can get to the floor, but in the meantime, let's stand behind a sense-of-the-Senate that it is way past time for us to address this issue of discrimination that fosters this culture of hatred. We saw that culture in full demonstration the night of October 6, 1998, when Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence, brutally assaulted, tortured, and left to die. We saw that culture of hatred in Orlando, FL, with the deaths of so many beautiful young people on that tragic night.

So we have before us two challenges. Let's address simple measures that can make a difference--that terrorists shouldn't have access to guns and that we should have a background check system that actually works, so gun shows and classified ads are treated the same as a purchase at a gun shop.

Let's decrease the size of the magazines. When Kip Kinkel took 1,127 rounds of ammunition and 3 guns to his school to kill as many of his schoolmates as he could, he was stopped because he ran out of ammunition and had to reload, and those 2 seconds gave a fellow student, Jacob Ryker, an opportunity to tackle him. He probably saved dozens of lives that day.

We have the challenge before us of these simple improvements in our background check system, in our terrorist list, and in our gun magazines, but we also need to end the discrimination that is embedded in the law that treats millions of Americans as second- class citizens and can foster among some, unfortunately, and contribute to a culture of hatred against those individuals. So let's do both.

Tonight I am so honored to be here with my colleagues sharing in this joint effort to say enough is enough. Let's not hide from these issues. Let's have a vote on these issues. Let's be accountable to our constituents on these issues. That will not happen if my colleague from Connecticut cannot get a vote on the proposal he is putting forward.

I wish this room right now had every desk filled. The beautiful speeches my colleagues have been giving, the reflections, the insight, the wisdom, the earnestness, the grief. But the room is not full. We need our colleagues in the majority to join us in this conversation that affects the lives of so many people in America.

What happened in Orlando, FL, not only killed 49 individuals, but it shattered their families, it shattered the community, and it shattered and reverberated throughout this Nation. And this--perhaps not to the same degree, but this type of violence goes on and on and on.

I believe my colleague from Connecticut has said that a major event of this nature, of multiple deaths, occurs every month. If you look at the events of person-on-person violence, if you look at what happens in our cities across this country, our rural areas across this country, every day there are acts of violence. Every day there are acts of hate crimes against our LGBT community. So let's do both of these.

We ask and we hope that citizens across the country will weigh in with those Senators who may not be here tonight and may not have been here this afternoon and may not have been here when this conversation started over 12 hours ago; that they might hear at least a reverberation, that the thoughts issued here reverberate back through the country and come back in those phone calls and in those letters to our colleagues' offices; that they might be aware and they might read the stories so many citizens could tell of an incident that might have been averted if we had a better system of laws on background checks and if we got rid of the discrimination embedded in our laws in this country.

So I ask my colleague from Connecticut, is it your hope, is it your aspiration that this body will indeed embrace and have a full dialogue--not just one side of the aisle but on both sides of the aisle--and that will lead to votes on these very significant proposals so that we can act to make America a better place?

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