Tragedy At the Covenant School in Nashville
Floor Speech
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Ms. LEE of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of the students, teachers, parents, and loved ones across western Pennsylvania who are still reeling from what we all thought was our worst fear come to life today.
Just days after families in Nashville went through an unimaginable hell of losing their 9-year-old children because they had the audacity to attend a school in America, we received word about an active shooter situation back home in Pittsburgh, first at Central Catholic High School, then Oakland Catholic, and eventually a dozen of our schools across Pennsylvania.
Imagine that you are a kid in Central Catholic. You have gone through the active shooter drills, and you saw the news Monday and heard about every school shooting prior. Today, you get a text that a gunman has entered your school.
You are wondering if you will be shot. Will it be your friends who are shot, your classmate, your teammate, your teacher? Can you protect them, or should you run? Do you have time to text your parents one last time?
Imagine that you are a teacher hysterically crying to the dispatcher a minute after you heard the news. You realize the lock on your door is broken, so you start building barricades with desks and chairs. You ask your students to protect themselves by whatever means possible, from the metal rod in the closet to the acid chemicals in the physics lab.
Imagine that you are a parent and receive that phone call or text. Your heart stops. Your world freezes, and your mind starts to race. Can you get to the school on time? Will you ever hug your baby again? Will they meet you at the reunification spot?
Active shooters, hoaxes, evacuations, active shooter drills--this is no way for our kids to live.
This is disgraceful, and no, to my colleagues across the aisle, this is not normal. Active shooters aren't normal. Shooting hoaxes aren't normal. The evacuations and the active shooting drills aren't normal. There is nothing about this that is normal.
Guns are the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 1 and 18--not car crashes, not illnesses or accidents. It is guns.
Tomorrow, we will send our students back to those buildings where they experienced that immense trauma and fear. We will expect them to pretend it is a normal day. We will expect them to continue to learn, perform, and be attentive in the same classrooms that they were just barricaded in.
Thankfully, unlike the students, teachers, and families in Nashville, Michigan, Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook, or too many others who were gunned down to count, they won't have to cry over their classmates' bodies or see their empty chairs when they return to school because this time, it was just a hoax--not a hoax. It was a swatting of children in schools in this era of heightened fear and vigilance around an epidemic of school and other mass shootings.
Thankfully, today, it wasn't dead children back home in Pittsburgh. It was ``just'' traumatized children.
It doesn't have to be this way, and it wouldn't be this way, but it is this way because Republicans care more about guns than our kids, worshippers in a church or synagogue, or shoppers in a Walmart.
Republicans want to control what books you read. They want to control what history you learn. They want to control how you identify, who you can love. They want to control our bodies.
They want to control everything except that which could prevent preventable mass deaths of children and students and worshippers and shoppers.
In the only country on Earth where this is a problem, they will not control the proliferation of guns in this country.
For those of you who say it is too political to ask that we put an end to bullet-ridden babies in body bags and traumatized kids doing active shooter drills in their elementary schools, I ask you to stop putting your politics over our children's lives.
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