BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. SLAUGHTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
This is a serious piece of work for me today because less than a year ago, one of our colleagues from Arizona was shot in the head while she was trying to convene with her constituents outside a supermarket. The mayhem was awful. A little 9-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green, a baseball fan who just came to see her Congresswoman, was killed. And by all accounts, an extraordinary Federal judge named John Roll died as well as some of Gabby's staff. Numbers of people were wounded. And yet the only person ever considered by this House would be the guy and his right to have that gun. What about the rights for the rest of us? Are we going to have to learn to dance up and down the street to try to escape the bullets? What happens to us? What about an amendment for us to ensure that we can be safe?
The statistics of people now being killed in places of worship, the rising number of people in law enforcement who face unspeakable and awful things because we won't do our job here to disarm people who are mentally ill.
I would like to insert into the Record an article from the New York Times on how easy it is for felons, including the mentally ill, to regain their gun rights.
When are we going to reinstate in this House the automatic weapons ban, and why don't we outlaw guns that are so powerful that they serve no purpose at all in a civilized society? When will we allow the Federal authorities to computerize gun sale records so it is easier to hold guilty individuals responsible for their gun crimes?
In the age of iPhones and Androids, our police are tracing gun crimes with scraps of paper and handwritten notes. Surely that is a more important job for us to do here than what we're doing--to say you can carry a concealed weapon anywhere you want to go because that's who we are. Apparently, the Republican majority wants that.
Based on today's bill, they think it is more important to pass legislation that will make it easier to carry a gun to a public gathering, easier to carry a loaded weapon into NFL stadiums, easier to carry a gun to the grocery store on Saturday noon, or into your temple or your church. What in the world? How can we ever explain that to people who have had gun deaths in their family?
The horrible shooting of our colleague wouldn't have been stopped with the passage of today's bill, and no one is made safer by allowing guns into public space. And since last January, Congress hasn't considered a single piece of legislation that would make it harder for a mentally ill individual to get a gun. We have done nothing at all to make sure that another nightmare like the one in Tucson doesn't visit our country yet again, leaving innocent children, men, and women victims to a loaded gun. And yet the only person we care about here is the gun owner.
The only legislation we are considering will make it more convenient to carry your gun even in States that don't want it. Realizing this fact really puts the morality of this agenda into perspective.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT