Madam Speaker, I rise today in response to the exceptional number of lives that have been stolen from American communities just this month to the continued scourge of gun violence in this country. On March 16th in Georgia, a gunman went on…
Madam Speaker, I rise today in response to the exceptional number of lives that have been stolen from American communities just this month to the continued scourge of gun violence in this country.
On March 16th in Georgia, a gunman went on a deadly rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area, murdering eight people. Six of the precious lives lost were women of Asian descent: mothers, sisters, and partners.
On March 20th in Pennsylvania, a gunman opened fire at a party in Philadelphia, killing one and wounding five others.
And on March 22nd in Colorado, a gunman took ten innocent souls at a grocery store in Boulder--one of which was a police officer who arrived to help.
I fear that many have grown numb to the news of violence, death, and dreams unrealized in this country, and to those I plead: see your neighbor as yourself. Protect your fellow Americans. Do not give up on the possibility of a future free from pain and fear of preventable death.
On behalf of the victims of gun violence and their families, we cannot be deterred in our mission to institute basic protections to shield the American people from continual loss. I will not surrender to hopelessness, and neither should my colleagues in this legislative body.
Americans Are Stubbornly Unmoved by Death
(By Robin Givhan)
The scene looked heartbreakingly familiar: the rumble of
tactical vehicles, the swarm of law enforcement officers, the
long ribbons of yellow police tape and the eyewitness
descriptions thick with residual terror. Monday evening's
deadly shooting in Boulder, Colo., which resulted in the
deaths of 10 people, including a police officer, was the
second mass shooting in a week.
A dreadful normalcy has returned. Muscle memory demands
that we lament it--even as all evidence suggests that many of
us are unmoved by death. It doesn't cause behavior to change.
It doesn't shake people from their moorings at the center of
their own universe. Death is not a deterrent.
In the days after a mass shooting, the nation mourns and
those who died are named. The hearts of our elected officials
have been broken so many times that surely they must be in
shards by now. The flags are lowered to half-staff. And the
president speaks. Joe Biden, a man who is expert at
consoling, did the best that he could to say something true
that did not sound like a cliche.
``I even hate to say it because we're saying it so often:
My heart goes out. Our hearts go out for the survivors, the--
who had to--had to flee for their lives and who hid,
terrified, unsure if they would ever see their families
again, their friends again,'' Biden said Tuesday afternoon
from the State Dining Room. ``The consequences of all this
are deeper than I suspect we know. By that, I mean the mental
consequences--a feeling of--anyway, it just--we've been
through too many of these.''
The images from these shootings can be gut-wrenching. In
video and still images, people see shellshocked survivors
pouring out of the school, the night club and, this time, the
grocery store. There's blood in these images, sometimes even
the blurred image of one of the deceased. There's nothing
sanitized about them. The shooting may happen behind closed
doors, but the death is in the open. The terror rises off the
survivors like a stench; the sound of fear reverberates.
And still the deaths don't spur action to make the guns
harder to get, to make the guns less efficient. The
president, some politicians and many activists cry out for
``common sense'' gun laws to stop the senseless death even as
it seems that they are pleading with a country that's engaged
in a completely different kind of calculation.
Increasingly it seems that we simply do not care about the
other person, that other family, someone else's child. The
self is everything. It's freedom and liberty, whims and
desires. Community doesn't extend beyond one's front door.
Everything else is someone else's concern.
Studies have shown that the human brain can lose the
capacity to process death, to absorb the meaning of it, when
the numbers of the dead begin to reach staggering levels. We
have been told that the heart can go numb in response to such
enormity, This is one of the explanations for why people have
continued to engage in risky behavior during the coronavirus
pandemic even as it has become ever clearer how best to
protect our fellow Americans. The end is on the horizon, and
if people simply wear a mask, social distance and persevere
with patience, we might get there--not all of us, sadly, but
most of us.
Yet unmasked revelers crowded onto the streets of Miami
Beach. The very real possibility of death has not been a
deterrent. The community didn't matter as these partyers and
tourists ostensibly shot a different kind of deadly slug into
the Florida air.
More than 544,000 deaths in the United States due to the
coronavirus have not sent everyone scurrying to protect their
neighbor. To follow common sense recommendations. To center
the community instead of the individual.
If that number is too big for people to grapple with, what
is the right number? What number is small enough that each
death touches the heart and therefore motivates people to
act, to be better? Is it 58--the number of people a man
killed at a Las Vegas country music festival in 2017? Is it
49--the number killed in a shooting at Orlando's Pulse
nightclub in 2016? Or perhaps the motivating number is nine,
which accounts for those who were fatally shot in Charleston
during a prayer meeting. Is it eight--the number who were
killed in Georgia just last week? It surely can't be one
because there are singular deadly shootings in communities
all too often and still nothing happens. Nothing.
We have not gone numb to death. To ``go numb'' suggests
that once there was feeling, once there was sensitivity. When
was that? Perhaps it was back in 1968 when, after the deaths
of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F.
Kennedy, Congress passed gun laws that formed the basis of
federal regulation that has been regularly eroded and only
occasionally strengthened. We haven't cared for a long time.
Not when the dying were schoolchildren, people in the midst
of prayer or contented folks just living quiet lives.
Harris's self-evident truth
Crowds gather in the street while a speaker blasts music an
hour past curfew in Miami Beach on Sunday. (Daniel A. Varela/
Miami Herald/AP)
Today, some in this country argue against gun laws with a
ferocity that moves beyond a right to hunt rabbits, or defend
oneself against an assailant or one's property in the face of
an intruder. We refuse to relinquish the delusion that 21st-
century America is a frontier town in which gunplay is a form
of justice.
Many insist that the very real possibility of mass deaths
does not outweigh a personal inconvenience or the setting
aside of a myth. Give up large-capacity magazines. Wear a
mask. These deaths matter.
We are not numb to death. We stubbornly, selfishly dismiss
it. We shake it off. But there is always an assault that has
the capacity to bring an individual low. Some bracing gut
punch that stings and startles. The pain might finally
register in a way that is deep and lasting. And that person
begins to feel something. But that may require death coming
directly to their own doorstep, since that's the only one
that, for many of us, seems to matter.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated
the year of the shooting at a Las Vegas country music
festival. It was in 2017, not 2018.