Prioritizing the Safety of Our Children

Floor Speech

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today almost exactly 6 months after the shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, in my district. I represent Michigan's Eighth District, which includes Ingham County, Livingston County, and north Oakland County. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been in meetings with survivors and local officials. There are few issues that link our urban areas to our suburban areas to our rural areas more than gun violence.

I also represent the east side of Lansing, Michigan, where, just in the past week, we have had gun violence between three young people. And I also represent Oxford, where 6 months ago we had the school shooting, the most recent school shooting before Uvalde, Texas.

I happened to be scheduled to speak at the Oxford Virtual Academy graduation, in-person graduation, the day after the Uvalde shooting. I spent the day in Oxford, as I have been doing about every month, and you could hear the pain that people felt in being retraumatized by watching what was going on in Uvalde.

The students who I was speaking to were a group of students who chose to join school virtually, many of them in the aftermath of the shooting. I had been with the Superintendent of Oxford Schools earlier in the day. He was one of the very first people on the scene helping to provide first aid to the young people that we lost. We talked about the trauma and retrauma that sets in in communities where gun violence happens again and again.

I may have a different angle on this issue than most. Guns and firearms are part of our culture in the State of Michigan. I grew up with guns. I remember very distinctly getting a four-wheeler along with my brother when I was 11, and my dad installing the gun racks when I was 12 so that my brother and I could go out shooting during the day.

I am a CIA officer who was trained on a Glock and an M4 semiautomatic for my three tours in Iraq alongside the military. My husband is a career Army officer and carried a weapon every day he was deployed. It is just something that is normal among the 99 percent of responsible gun owners in the State of Michigan.

It is because of that background that I fundamentally reject this idea that either you care about gun ownership, or you care about school safety. That is a fundamentally false choice.

In Michigan, as I said, we have responsible gun owners everywhere. Since the shooting, I have heard from more of them in the past 2 weeks than I have in the previous 4 years; active hunters and sportsmen who are strongly in favor of things like commonsense background checks so that mentally ill people don't get their hands on weapons, and certainly things like safe storage of weapons so that a child can't get ahold of a parent's weapon and use it to kill their peers.

I have a bill that is going in this package today in the House. Safe Guns, Safe Kids Act is the name of it. It is part of protecting our kids in a serious, commonsense way. All it says is that if you are an adult and you have a firearm in the house, and you also have children, you have to take reasonable steps to secure that weapon, and if the child gets ahold of that weapon and uses it to commit a crime, like mass murder, you can be criminally liable for that crime.

The bill doesn't impact your decision to buy a gun. Instead, it asks that you act responsibly when you have it. This is not controversial. It is not partisan. It is basic common sense and what most people do anyway, just like my dad. Personal responsibility is at the heart of what it means to be an American, and gun owners have a critical role to play in making sure we can protect our communities.

While the provisions that the House will approve today are commonsense measures, I have no illusion on how partisan this is going to be. I know how much the gun lobby has sway with my peers, and I know that straight-up, selfish interest in being reelected is guiding my colleagues in this Chamber. But I encourage my friends on both sides of the aisle to prioritize public health and public safety over political concerns.

Anything that we pass here in the House will need support in the Senate to become law, so we want more of our Republican colleagues to join with us. We want more brave individuals to cross the aisle and say: I am going to do something about the thing that is now the number one killer of young people in America. It is gun violence. It is not car accidents. It is not drug overdoses, and it is not cancer. It is gun violence.

To my friends who are considering how to vote on some of the provisions today, I encourage you to make a choice. Do you care about dealing with the leading cause of death of young people or not? I urge you to join us.

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