Middle Class Tax Cut Act--Motion to Proceed--Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, it is a terrible time in our country. The entire country is in mourning for the 12 innocent people who were gunned down in Aurora, CO, last week. Our thoughts and our prayers are with dozens more still recovering from their wounds. We are mourning with people we never knew, with unfamiliar names, but we have seen pictures of grief-stricken parents, friends, neighbors, and our hearts break with them. We wish we could reach across the country and offer them some comfort while we mourn.
We know our mourning alone will not be enough to prevent a future tragedy unless we do something. We in Congress have an obligation to turn grief into action, as we have often done when faced with tragedy. So I come to the floor today to ask a question: When will we wake up? How many of our sons and daughters have to die before we go to work? It is time to sound the alarm on gun violence in our country. It is time for us to gather to talk about commonsense solutions. And I am talking about all of us--all 100. It should not matter which side of the aisle we are on. All of us who serve here have someone we love, someone we know, someone with whom we are in contact, whether it is our child, our sister, our brother, our father, or our mother. The lives of our loved ones depend on us and we should not let them down.
Right now, our Nation's lax gun laws make it far too easy for murderers to commit incomprehensible acts of violence and terror. Very early last Friday morning, we witnessed a massacre, and it has become something we have seen far too often. A tragedy with even less deaths, with less wounded, with less hurt is a tragedy of enormous proportion when something like this happens in this great country of ours. There is so much to live for, so much to enjoy, but here innocent people died.
This guy arrived at a movie theater in Aurora, CO, and he had an assault rifle with a 100-round magazine, a shotgun, and two handguns. He unleashed a barrage of bullets murdering 12 innocent people and injuring 58 more in a matter of minutes. In the theater at the time there was a total population of 200 people, and 70 of them were wounded or killed in a matter of minutes. Even though the police responded rapidly--within 90 seconds--with his high-capacity magazine, the gunman had more than enough time to carry out his reign of terror.
Among those who lost their lives were parents, mothers, fathers, servicemen, a veteran, a recent high school graduate, a college student, and a 6-year-old-girl named Veronica Moser Sullivan. She was the youngest to be murdered in Colorado that night and someone whose tragic death reminds us all too well of the time 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green was murdered in Tucson last year because she wanted to know more about her government. She was part of a group who greeted Representative Giffords.
The victims of these horrible tragedies deserve more than words of solidarity and mourning. They deserve our attention, our action. What we do to prevent these tragedies in the future will be the real test of character of this body. The best way to prove we are concerned is to take the action necessary to protect young lives because on that score now we lose.
I have been in the Senate a long time, and I have seen too many Americans murdered by guns, too many lives cut short because of the easy availability of guns, and too many times Congress has sat back, cowered before the gun lobby and done nothing to prevent these tragedies from happening in the future. We can't wait any longer, Mr. President, without the public at large challenging our effectiveness, wanting to know what it is we are doing to protect the next group of children and parents and loved ones.
The murderers in Colorado and Arizona both had something that enabled them to bring about the mayhem they did. They had a mega-magazine capable of shooting dozens of rounds without having to reload. They bought them legally. Here we see a picture of what this man had--a semiautomatic rifle and a 100-round drum magazine.
These magazines were originally designed for law enforcement and military people. These magazines were banned from 1994 to 2004, a period of 10 years, but under pressure from the gun lobby, Congress let that ban expire in 2004. It wasn't an accident. It didn't happen without complicity.
Just think about it. The Colorado shooter carried a 100-round magazine, and if he hadn't had that magazine, maybe the shooting toll would have been substantially lower. Maybe more lives would have been saved. Maybe more loved ones--husbands, wives, and children--would be alive today. Maybe there would be fewer people suffering from bullet wounds.
In the Arizona shooting, the shooter was only subdued when he paused to change his 30-round magazine, and if he had to stop sooner, obviously precious lives could have been saved.
These magazines are the tools of mass murderers. No matter what the gun lobby would have you believe, nobody needs a mega-magazine to go duck hunting. These high-capacity magazines put all of our families in danger, and they endanger our law enforcement officers as well. We send them into the line of fire to defend us against mass murderers such as the Colorado shooter, who legally bought 6,000 bullets and a gun magazine that holds 100 bullets over the Internet. The safety of our families is too important to let this continue. There are too many bullets, too many deaths, and too many funerals. But not enough people are saying: Stop it. Do your job. Protect my family. Protect my kids. Protect my parents.
Here are the facts. Guns have murdered more Americans here at home in recent years than have died on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. More have been murdered on the grounds of the United States than have died in far-off battlefields. It is shocking. More than 6,500 American soldiers have died in the service of our country in support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the same period, guns here were used to murder about 100,000 people.
Americans deserve a Congress that makes the safety of our families a priority. That is why I urge my colleagues today to help our people. Bring back the ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines such as the one used in Colorado on Friday and the one used in Arizona last year. That was the law from 1994 to 2004. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Even former Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested that it may be appropriate to reinstate this ban. It is time to work together, all of us, to ban high-capacity magazines. Don't do it for me. Do it for your family. Do it for your constituents. Stand and say: I don't want your family hurt. I don't want your children to fall prey to a gunman.
It is time to begin a national conversation once more about taking commonsense measures to prevent gun violence in America. And to those who are fearful about the power of the NRA, understand that we bested them before and we will do it again. We beat them in 1996 when an effort that I began to ban the sale of guns to domestic abusers passed, we have stopped over 200,000 of those people from getting gun permits since that time, and a lot of lives could have been saved in there. We stood up to them again in 1999 when the Senate came together after Columbine and passed legislation to close the gun show loophole. Unfortunately, after passing in the Senate, the House refused to do anything about it. If we show resolve and if we stand with courage, I know we can do the right thing once more. There are no more excuses for inaction.
I say to my colleagues, look at your children. Look at the pictures that may be on your mantelpiece. Think about the happy days with your kids, think about the enjoyment you share together, and think about what we want to do to be able to continue those lives we enjoy so much. The stakes are just too high. We have to intervene while the memory, unfortunately, is still fresh.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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