Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to reintroduce a bill that didn't get passed last Congress, a bill that deals with safety in our schools, a bill aimed at the disasters that come when schoolchildren are killed by shooters and to deal with this problem through a program that the Secret Service has had for decades and asking the Secret Service to see what they can do to apply the principles of that program to stop mass killings at our schools.

Three years ago, on February 14, 2018, an unspeakable tragedy occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. In less than 4 minutes, 14 students and 3 staff members were killed, and, consequently, their families' and friends' lives were shattered forever by such a senseless act.

Today, along with my colleagues Senators Rubio and Scott of Florida, Senators Cortez Masto, Collins, Manchin, and Hassan, I am proud to reintroduce legislation that will proactively mitigate threats of violence on school campuses by reauthorizing and expanding the U.S. Secret Service's program called the National Threat Assessment Center.

The National Threat Assessment Center studies targeted violence and develops best practices and training to identify and manage threats before they result in violence like we saw at that school 3 years ago.

The bill establishes a Safe School Initiative, a national program on school violence prevention, that will include expanded research on school violence. Most importantly, this legislation allows the Secret Service to directly equip communities and schools with training and best practices on recognizing and preventing school violence.

This bill, which I hope will help us to recognize the signs of a potential attack way long before such an attack occurs, carries the namesake of those it couldn't save, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mascot, so this bill is called the EAGLES Act because that is the mascot of that school.

Two years ago, the Secret Service conducted a review of school shootings and made a very pivotal finding: All attackers exhibited concerning behaviors prior to engaging in an act of violence. In other words, it should be easy to identify these people, and, if identified, intervention is possible. So had these signs been recognized at an early enough stage, these attacks could have been stopped.

In the wake of the Parkland shooting in 2018, Congress took steps to protect schools and to prevent gun violence, including the passage of the Students, Teachers, and Officers Preventing School Violence Act, which provided funding to schools to strengthen their infrastructure to make it more difficult for shooters to enter schools.

At that same time, we passed the Fix NICS Act, a law which penalizes Federal agencies that fail to comply with legal requirements to report dangerous individuals and violent criminals to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System so that if they are so reported, then they won't be able to purchase a gun. However, by passing the EAGLES Act, we are entering a vital third step in addition to those other two bills to protect our schools.

I would like to encourage all of my Senate colleagues to support this bipartisan and, I think, a very commonsense bill. I hope that we can focus on productive measures like these rather than unfocused efforts to undermine lawful gun ownership

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