Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for her powerful words and for hosting this Special Order, and I thank the Congressional Black Caucus. I certainly want to thank my colleague from Georgia (Mrs. McBath). I had the chance to…
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for her powerful words and for hosting this Special Order, and I thank the Congressional Black Caucus. I certainly want to thank my colleague from Georgia (Mrs. McBath). I had the chance to serve with her on the Judiciary Committee, and I know she feels this very deeply and very passionately and rightly so.
I think it is important for all of us to try to make sure that even if we haven't suffered a great loss like that, that we try to understand and remember the importance of the impact of what that kind of an event can do to a family, to a community, and what it has done to the country.
I am blessed with six kids, and they all live in the D.C. area. We meet together frequently on weekends. I am a grandfather, too. A few months back, my granddaughter was in a heated argument with her cousin. They are not the arguing type, so I kind of paused and started listening. I was trying to figure out: What are you all arguing about?
She looked at me and said: Well, we are trying to figure out the best way you should respond when an active shooter comes into your school.
She had her version of it, and he had his version. I just remember being sort of stunned by the whole thing because I am 65. I grew up in a different era, obviously. I am originally from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Dale City, Virginia. They are two quiet towns, especially back in the sixties and seventies, at least on this kind of front. I went to schools where we had fire drills, but we didn't have active shooter drills. We are now at the point where schools are being approached and they are selling bulletproof blackboards, and they are selling bulletproof backpacks and the like. That is where our schools have come.
There have been debates about whether teachers should be armed or not. Although we have seen that having armed personnel at a school during an active shooter drill doesn't necessarily fix that problem, but that is kind of where we went with that.
I came up and didn't really know much about gun violence until I became a prosecutor, first here in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Attorney's Office. It just happened that I started that job in 1990, which was in the middle of the crack wars. D.C. was averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 500 homicides per year. The numbers have jumped from when I was a kid. Murder was a front-page story, but it got so prevalent during that timeframe that sometimes they didn't report on a homicide. They didn't even make the paper. There were just so many coming in day after day after day after day. It was young people killing young people, young males in particular, usually over drug disputes, but sometimes not even that.
When I later became elected prosecutor in Prince George's County, I had cases that were kind of the same ilk. A guy cut in front of another guy in line. He was looking at my girl. He disrespected me. All of that was sufficient to kill somebody on the spot.
Those were young boys. Well, young men in some instances, late teens, early twenties. That is where we were as a country. That is where we, in some ways, remain as a country.
Just before I was elected State's attorney and was sworn into office, we had a double murder that took place in our community. What was special about this one was that these were two deputy sheriffs who had been killed, gunned down. They had been called to a family's house. A mother and a father were having trouble with their son, and they called because it was a mental health call.
The two officers, Arnaud and Magruder, came into the house, and they said: Well, he is down the hallway. So they walked down the hallway towards the bedroom not knowing that he had hidden the gun in his bedroom inside the speaker of the stereo system. As they came down the hall, he grabbed the gun, confronted them and shot both of them to death. Then he ran out of the house.
I had not even become State's attorney yet. I hadn't been sworn in yet, but going to that funeral was my first official act as State's attorney. Sadly, there were hundreds of more murders to come. We still have them. Crimes are coming down in Prince George's County, and crimes are coming down in Washington, D.C. Crimes are coming down across the country, but any murder is too many. As we just heard from our colleague from Georgia, that mother and that father never stopped grieving over the loss of that child, and rightly so.
When I got to Congress 3 years ago, one of the things I started trying to figure out was: What are the things that we can do to try and address this problem?
I recognize that Democrats and Republicans are in different places. We had an assault weapons ban in the United States in the nineties. It expired. Evidence seemed to show that there was some success from that, but our Republican colleagues then and Republicans across the country opposed it.
It has never been re-enacted. Are there common ground approaches to try and address this problem? Are there ways in which we can find a common ground approach to deal with some of these issues?
I looked around and thought if we can't do assault weapon bans, what about ghost guns? Ghost guns came out maybe not even 10 years ago. For those of you that don't know, ghost guns are guns that do not have serial numbers on them. They can't be identified. The reason they are popular, especially among criminals, is because you can use the gun and drop it. If you don't leave any fingerprint or DNA on it, they sure can't trace back through the gun to figure out who had it and who committed the murder.
Guess what happened. The use of ghost guns surged. Between 2017 and 2023, there was a 1,600 percent jump in the use of ghost guns at crime scenes. It went from 1,629 to 27,490 in a 6-year period.
What can we try and do about that? We can try to do legislation. We do legislation here in Congress, right? Let's try and do the legislation piece.
Democrats offered two bills to ban ghost guns and do it in different ways. Hundreds of Democrats signed on, not one Republican signed on to either bill, either piece of legislation to ban ghost guns.
That didn't work, but the crime, as you heard, continued to go up. The use of ghost guns in crimes continued to go up. It skyrocketed, really. The Biden administration said to the ATF, issue a regulation, base it on the Gun Control Act, which is the longstanding law that covers gun usage and the regulation of guns in the United States, and maybe that will help.
They issued the regulation about 2, 3 years ago at this point. My Republican
colleagues--I was on the Judiciary Committee at the time--railed against it. It is a horrible overreach, they said, by the Biden administration. It is an infringement on our constitutional rights, our Second Amendment rights. Of course, there were challenges. It was taken to court and worked its way up to the Supreme Court. Guess what happened at the Supreme Court: 7-2 margin in Bondi v. Vanderstok.
The Supreme Court said: We are going to uphold this regulation. We don't think it violates the Constitution. We are going to let it stand. That opinion was written by Justice Gorsuch. In fact, all three Trump Supreme Court appointees joined in the majority of that opinion. I thought, well, maybe that is a big step in the right direction.
Now I am on the Appropriations Committee, and guess what. Just a few weeks ago, the Republicans put out a bill and the bill contains language to undercut the enforcement of that regulation.
Now, why would they do that? We know that only criminals want to use ghost guns. There is no other purpose. If you are a law-abiding citizen, it doesn't matter if you have an identification number on it. It is just like a car. Cars have VIN numbers. Why can't guns have identification numbers? It is certainly useful for law enforcement. It can't be on those grounds, and it can't be constitutional grounds because the Trump Supreme Court by 7-2 vote just told them this does not violate the Second Amendment. They put out this reg, quietly.
I hope it doesn't pass in the Senate, but that is where it is now. They are trying to undercut it, even though it is constitutional. It is not just the ghost guns piece. It is other issues, too. One that I thought we would be able to find common ground on was suicide.
In 2026, we have 27,600 suicides by gun, 4,600 were veterans. Whether Democrats or Republicans, we all love veterans, right? Why wouldn't we want to support efforts to try and bring down suicides among veterans?
As you just heard a few minutes ago, many of the programs that are aimed at reducing gun violence, including for suicides, have been cut by the Trump administration. Matter fact, one of the first things the Trump administration did when they came into office was to eliminate grants that helped reduce gun violence across the country that had been proven to work over the past few years. Not only that, the President issued an executive order that removed the Surgeon General's advisory report on firearm violence because it used the term ``public health crisis in America,'' I guess, which could it be any more obvious that this is a public health crisis. It is the number one cause of death in young people.
I remember having a debate with my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee one time about whether it was number one or number two, and I paused and said: Does it really matter? Is it okay if it is only the number two cause of death in the United States for our children? Isn't that sufficient for us to want to try and do something on this front?
The Trump administration also cut funding to address gun violence prevention, $66 million for assistance for gun violence victims, $82 million for law enforcement support and training and safety. Why would we cut those? The training piece, if you didn't know how important it was, you should really know after watching ICE in action in Minneapolis. The killings of Good and Pretti, among other acts of violence that took place at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota and across the country, I think clearly demonstrate that those agents were not prepared for the type of policing that they were put out there to do, not at all.
They certainly weren't trained in things like the force continuum. In fact, many of them didn't even have the tools that you would use other than guns along the force continuum, no tasers and the like.
It is the same thing when they put the National Guard on the street. President Trump put them out in D.C., and I remember being out at dinner with my wife one day when they first came out. They were walking around in groups of four and five with M4s.
We were eating outdoors at a restaurant, so there were crowds of people all along the walkways. I thought about it and I said: M4s are so powerful that even if they shot the right guy and hit him, the bullet would keep going.
Now, when you are in warfare and you guys are facing each other, the soldiers are facing each other, that is one thing because if it goes through that guy, it is going to hit another bad guy behind them. But when you are in a crowded street like I was on the waterfront here in Washington, D.C., the last thing you want to have to use is an M4 because the collateral damage is not just collateral damage. It is human beings whose lives could be taken, even though they weren't doing anything but just walking along the waterfront enjoying the evening.
Let me say this, as well. I think that the goal, at least that I came here with, was to try and find ways to address gun violence. I thought ghost gun restrictions would be one way to go. Clearly, that was wrong. Let me try another angle on this. We put out a bill called Raise the Age, and the thinking on that was, if we raise the age from 18 to 21 for people purchasing assault weapons, they will be okay with that because it moved from 18 to 21 when Reagan was President. He supported it for handguns.
If we are going to have 21 for handguns, shouldn't we also have it for assault weapons? Why allow them to buy an AR-15, but they can't buy a 9 millimeter? I got zero cosponsors from the Republican side on that bill, this Congress and last Congress. I can't get any of them to support it.
Mr. Speaker, I get it. I know there is a lot of political challenges here and, frankly, we will keep working at it, but I knew when Republican colleagues were shot and Democratic colleagues have been shot, when we have been victimized by gun violence and we still can't move on legislation to address gun violence, then I don't know that there is enough to make it happen. When it is people outside of this Chamber, other than us getting shot, is enough. I just don't know if that is ever going to be the case.
I think we have to continue to keep fighting and keep working to address this problem because the homicides keep happening, the bodies keep falling, the chalk lines around them keep being drawn, and the pools of blood oozing out of their bodies until the police get there to try to fix the problem that, in many instances, these guns are too powerful to allow them to be fixed.
Let's try to find a way to address this. Let's try to find a way to work together. Mr. Speaker, I know you are not going to agree to all the legislation that I would propose. I certainly don't agree with a lot that has been done by my Republican colleagues--surely, in the cuts and especially to the ghost gun regulation. I can't figure it out.
I can't figure out why we would want to restrict information from being gathered so that researchers and scientists can try to figure out other approaches to reduce gun violence, other than just enforcement.
We have seen intervention and prevention programs work. Why shouldn't we study them to see if we can expand them to see if we can find ways to combine enforcement with intervention and prevention efforts and reverse gun violence even more? Why can't we do that?
We will see how it goes. I can't say I am super-hopeful right now, but I truly believe that we can find a way to protect people's Second Amendment rights and also protect second graders. We have to find a way to make sure that they can be safe in school, on the streets, and in their homes. We have to find a way to bring down the suicides for veterans who serve this country and, in many instances, were broken because of their service to this country, because of what we had them do. We also have to find ways to protect law enforcement officers, who put their lives on the line out there on the street and are particularly at risk from gun violence, as well.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Virginia for putting this together. I thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus. I hope we can find a way to work together across the aisle, this Chamber and the other Chamber on the other side of the building, and even with the Trump administration, to get something done on this front.
I know the routine mantra that we just have to lock them up. We need more penalties, more enforcement, no bail, and all of that. The problem is that all of these first-time shooters, many of them mass shooters, we didn't have a chance to keep them in jail because they never went. We didn't have a chance to withhold bail because they didn't have to pay bail to be out on the street.
Let's not wait. Let's address this problem. Let's work together. Let's save lives here in the United States.
