Renewing the Assault Weapons Ban

Floor Speech

RENEWING THE ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN -- (Senate - December 19, 2007)

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, the past month has been marked by several high profile, tragic shootings. Across the country, Americans have been attacked in places once thought safe, by people wielding deadly firearms. There can be little doubt that the plague of gun violence is continuing to permeate our society. At what point will we say act.

Early Sunday morning December 9, a young man entered a Christian missionary center in the Denver suburb of Arvada, carrying an assault rifle and approximately 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Shooting randomly, he gunned down two staff members in their mid-20s and wounded two others. Just over 12 hours later, the same gunman walked into a church 75 miles away in Colorado Springs and killed two sisters, 18 and 16 years-old, and wounded six others, before shooting himself.

Four days earlier, on December 5, a young man entered a busy mall in Omaha, NE, carrying an assault rifle. Spraying bullets at people at both point blank range and from the third-floor balcony, sending holiday shoppers running as dozens of shots echoed throughout the mall. Before he turned the gun on himself, the gunman had killed eight people and wounded five others, two critically.

Of course, these were only the shootings that captured national headlines. Hundreds of others fell to their deaths this past month at the hands of someone with a firearm. This month caps a year that witnessed the worst ever school shooting in the United States, when a student killed 32 classmates and staff members at Virginia Tech University. Each one of these horrific events emphasizes the need for common sense gun legislation. Together they scream out for change. As 2007 draws to a close I once again urge my colleagues to help put an end to these kind of tragedies by renewing the assault weapons ban.

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