It’s one of those days. Six years ago Sunday was the anniversary of when 60 members of the House of Representatives decided they needed to do something in addition to what wasn’t happening in Congress. That was the Orlando nightclub shooting. The frustration was so high that we, representatives of working men and women, needed to do something. Six years ago.
We see our phones – 14 children slaughtered, and an adult. You gotta say, ‘What the F is going on?’ It’s absolutely remarkable what’s going on in our nation and somehow, we can’t do anything about it.
Well, let me tell you, we aren’t even allowed to study it because of laws that were put in place prior to many of us being able to change that. So, gee, go study the issue. But somehow it’s: put your head in the sand and say, ‘We just can’t do it, it’s just people.’
Well, I don’t buy that bullshit – excuse me – I don’t buy it at all.
I understand hunters. I’ve worked with them. I used to hunt. But at no time did we think hunting included people. That we needed those weapons of mass destruction which are designed to do nothing but kill people – those automatic weapons, you don’t need that for sporting.
That looking into somebody’s background to say that they may be a potential problem, we’re not even doing that. ‘It’s not the guns, it’s the people.’ How many mass knifings do you see? No, the weapons have a lot to do with it. And we as a country, given all that’s going on in the world and there’s just a ton of it, slaughtering children? Seven-year-olds.
I thought Sandy Hook was unbelievable and it was. King’s Highway, 1975-ish: Cherry Hill had a mass shooting. I remember that growing up, the office building down there. Camden City: Unrah was considered the first mass shooting of modern times. Buffalo: two weeks ago, in a supermarket.
I was in Boulder, Colorado, a week and a half ago. Our national labs for renewable energy are out there and we were visiting, and my colleague Ed Perlmutter, as we’re driving up to the lab, points out a supermarket. Nine months ago that’s where his mass shooting was. Virtually every member can talk about a mass shooting in their district.
This isn’t a Republican or a Democratic issue. But it is an issue of the United States of America. There is no country in the world that comes even remotely close to what happens here. And we have to be mature enough, open enough to take a look at ourselves – yes, to study it – and do something about it.
As they say: If not now, then when? So please, let us all have a conversation, a debate, with adults in the room to say, ‘How can we look at this?’ And do what’s right for our children.”
