Madam President, I join my colleague, the senior Senator from Florida, with a broken heart, as does most of the Nation due to the events of yesterday. There, indeed, was a time in the history of our country where after an event such as…
Madam President, I join my colleague, the senior Senator from Florida, with a broken heart, as does most of the Nation due to the events of yesterday.
There, indeed, was a time in the history of our country where after an event such as this there was a mourning period that followed with a policy debate, but today, that time is interrelated and intermixed. I don't blame it. I am not upset about it. In fact, I think there have been too many of
these events now. That is why we continue to face it.
I think it is legitimate to say that even as we mourn, we have an obligation to ask ourselves, Is there something we could have done or should do to ensure that we don't see these things happening?
It is cliche to say, but I think it is important to say: I am the father of two young ladies who happen to be in high school. I cannot imagine, but I can only envision, what it would be like if one day walking through the Capitol I get a text or one of those news alerts that says there has been a shooting in the high school they attend. I can only imagine how fearful it would be when suddenly those texts are not being answered, and those calls are not being returned. I thought about that last night and what it must feel like to be one of those parents at the hotel waiting for word because you hadn't heard from your children in hours or how painful it must have been for those whose job it was to go to these parents and inform them that their child's life--whom they had sent off to school in the morning, perhaps just weeks away from graduation--had ended senselessly in an event such as this. Because of what happened yesterday and because it is happening so often, people from across the political spectrum are arguing, there has to be something we can do; you have to be able to do something.
I agree with that sentiment. I understand it. I would add, though, that if we do something, it should be something that works. The struggle up to this point has been that most of the proposals that have been offered would not have prevented not just yesterday's tragedy but any of those in recent history.
I am going to say now what I am going to really emphasize at the end. Just because these proposals would not have prevented these events does not mean we raise our hands and say, therefore, there is nothing we can do. It is a tough issue. Part of the reason it is so hard to prevent these events is because if someone decides they are going to take it upon themselves to kill people, whether it is a political assassination of one person or the mass killing of many, if one person decides to do it, and they are committed to that task, it is a very difficult thing to stop. Again, that does not mean we should not try to prevent as many of them as we can.
Perhaps the answer to how to prevent them begins by asking ourselves, What do these things have in common? They have two things in common. The first is that every single one of them was premeditated and planned. None of these shootings were an act of passion, where someone got up in the morning, was upset, and decided to do something out of rage. They all involved careful planning and premeditation. They deliberately took steps to get the guns, the weapons, the ammunition they needed. In many cases, they carefully studied the outline of the target they were going to go after. They specifically planned soft targets. There is evidence of that in this case. They planned to maximize the loss of life. They acquired the weapon they needed, and they used tactics they needed to kill as many people as they could.
By the way, that premeditation and planning is one of the reasons why these laws that have been proposed wouldn't have prevented it. When someone is planning and premeditating an attack, they will figure out a way to evade those laws or, quite frankly, to comply with them in order to get around them.
That may be an argument for new laws of a different kind, but it is what makes it hard, though not impossible.
The second thing they have in common is, almost all of these attacks were preceded by clear signs of what was to come. A cursory review this morning of just a handful of the recent cases points that out.
We are all familiar with the loss of life of over 20 people at a Texas church not long ago. This was a case of a killer whose wife had said he had tried to kill her. He was an individual who had been arrested and convicted for domestic violence, which had, unfortunately, never been reported to the background check system. He was an individual who had escaped a mental health facility, who had been caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base while on Active Duty, who had been discharged from the military for bad conduct, who had had social media posts that had bragged about buying dogs so as to shoot them, and who had actually expressed admiration for the South Carolina killer in that church killing a few years ago. He was an individual who had actually been charged with animal mistreatment just a few years earlier.
At Sandy Hook, we know the killer had a spreadsheet with details of the previous school shootings. He was also an individual whose mental state had rapidly deteriorated to the point at which he had spoken to no one but his mother, whom he ultimately had killed before having carried out the horrific massacre. He had been someone who had been isolated in a room all day, who had largely played video games.
The Pulse attack was precipitated and inspired by an adherence to the jihadist ideology. As Senator Nelson has already pointed out, this individual not once but twice had been on the FBI's radar screen and both times had been cleared. They had interviewed him, and they had asked him questions. He hadn't met the standard for staying on the list, and he had gone off.
We are still learning facts about yesterday's killer. Unlike these others, we may learn more because he was apprehended alive. Authorities have had an opportunity to question him, and that will continue. Here is what we know:
We know he was expelled from school for behavior the administrators often thought was dangerous. We know now from press accounts that both teachers and students did not act surprised that he was the assailant. In fact, many of them said there was a running joke--obviously not a joke anymore--that, one day, he would do something like this. We know the media and others have discovered social media posts that are, in hindsight, deeply disturbing, as they point to the glorification of gun violence and murder and even animal cruelty, apparently. We saw reports this morning of a post on YouTube a year ago on which he posted that he wanted to be a school shooter. The FBI was alerted to this and had followed up, by the way, in an interview with the person who had alerted them.
They all have this premeditation in common, and we sit here in hindsight, in seeing all of these little points and say, taken together, those are warning signs. The problem is, they are not taken together because the people who might have known about his being expelled may not have known about the social media posts, and the people who knew about the social media posts may not have known what he wrote on YouTube, and the people who knew about the YouTube may not have known about the fact that the police had been called several times for different reasons and so forth--hence, the challenge in finding something that works.
There are a lot of proposals, and I will share them because I have heard them before, and I hear them today. I am not diminishing them. I don't want this to be taken as ``because it will not work, I don't even want to hear your argument.'' I understand. I really do. You read in the newspaper that they used certain kinds of guns; therefore, let's make it harder to get those kinds of guns. I don't have some sort of de facto religious objection to that or some ideological commitment to that per se. There are all kinds of guns that are outlawed and weaponry that is outlawed and/or a special category. The problem is, we did that once, and it didn't work for a lot of reasons. One of them is that there are already millions of them on the streets, and those things last 100 years.
You could pass a law that makes it hard to get this kind of gun in a new condition, but you are going to struggle to keep it out of the hands of someone who has decided that is what he wants to use because there are so many of them out there already that would be grandfathered in.
You could do a background check. The truth is, in almost all of these cases I have cited, the individuals either erroneously passed background checks or would have passed them or did. Even if they couldn't pass the background checks, they could buy the guns the way MS-13 does and other gangs and other street elements do--from the black market.
Again, it is not that we shouldn't have the background check. I am just
trying to be clear and honest here. If someone has decided ``I am going to commit this crime,'' he will find a way to get the gun to do it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a law that makes it harder. It just means, to be honest, that it is not going to stop this from happening. You could still pass the law per se, but you are still going to have these horrible attacks.
That is why I do think that in some circles, it is not fair or right to create this impression that somehow this attack happened yesterday because there is some law out there that we could have passed to have prevented it. If there had been such a law that could have prevented what happened yesterday, I think a lot of people would have supported it, but I also want to be honest with the people who share my point of view on these issues.
I think it is also wrong to say there is nothing we can do. I would admit that, perhaps, even I in the past, in the way I have addressed this issue or have spoken about it, may have come off as dismissive in the argument that since none of these laws would have worked, there is just nothing we can do, and we will just have to deal with it. Just because I don't have a quick or an easy answer for how to prevent these doesn't mean we don't have an obligation to try and find one, and by finding one, I don't mean a quick and easy answer. I mean an answer that would work.
When I took office here, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States--every element of it. I didn't write the Constitution, but I agree with it, and I support it. The Second Amendment is in the Constitution, and you can debate what the outlines of the Second Amendment are or how far it goes, but it is in there, and I happen to support it. Oftentimes, I happen to point to the Second Amendment and say it is the Second Amendment that is right after free speech, which tells you how important it was to those who wrote those words. I still believe every bit of that.
If it is fair to say the Second Amendment is so important--and I reiterate it because of how high up it is in the ranking from first to second, its being the second one--then I have to recognize there is a part of the Constitution that was written even before the Second Amendment. It is the preamble. That preamble lays out why we have a Constitution and, ultimately, why we have a government. In it, it reads that two of the reasons we have a government and, therefore, two of the reasons we have a Senate is to ensure domestic tranquility and to promote the general welfare.
These school shootings and mass shootings and murders we are seeing now at an accelerated pace are, by definition, a threat to our domestic tranquility and a threat to our general welfare--the murder of children in schools, the murder of moviegoers, the murder of people at a church, the murder of people at a dance club on a Saturday night. These are all places at which we should be enjoying the general welfare and domestic tranquility.
Even as we recognize that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to bear arms and protect themselves--a right I strongly support and will continue to support--we must also recognize that same Constitution places upon this government an obligation to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare.
We must confront the fact that, over the last 20 years, these attacks have accelerated. We must recognize the evidence that they are not isolated from one another and are building upon one another. We must recognize the scary reality that even as the Nation mourns and the parents grieve, there is a high probability, if not a certainty, that somewhere in America right now, some equally troubled, deranged, and violent individual is reading and watching coverage of this attack and gaining from it not sorrow but inspiration. Even as we speak here now, even as we stand here in mourning, and even as the days go by, there are probably some people out there who are going to try to do this because of what happened yesterday. That is a frightening thought, but it is a reality. It challenges us to find an answer to a very difficult issue of all of these bits and pieces of information out there.
How do we in this society confront those who do things about which in another era we would just say, ``Well, they are just strange people. They are just weird. They are just going through a phase''?
We cannot do it anymore. There is no longer such a thing as just innocent postings online that you just look at and say, ``Well, that is just them. They are just strange. They don't mean anything by it'' or ``they are harmless.'' We cannot assume that anymore--none of us.
How do we create a system in which all of these disconnected pieces and bits of data could somehow be tied together so whenever it was that this killer got ahold of these weapons and before conducting this attack, someone would say, ``Hold on a second. This person is the person who got expelled from school, who had these social media posts, who said he wanted to be a school shooter, who had his adopted mother pass away in November and who is now living, isolated, whose fellow students had all suspected him of being a person who could, one day, be violent''?
How do you take these bits and pieces of information and turn them into a usable source of data that perhaps either prevents the acquisition of a weapon or, preferably, intervenes in that person's life before he carries this out? If anyone here tells you he has that one figured out, he is not being honest.
This is hard, but we need to do it. We need to somehow figure it out because it goes to the very core of why we exist. There is no greater obligation of our government than to keep our people safe from threats, both foreign and domestic, and we must acknowledge that this is a threat. For whatever reason, we now live in a society in which someone, at 19 years of age, in the freest and the most prosperous Nation in all of human history, has decided to take it upon himself to take the lives of 17 individuals and severely injure 14 others--and to actually, probably, try to kill even more.
What is happening in our country, in our culture, in our society?
If there is something to be done with our laws, we should do that too. I am not saying don't focus on the gun part, but we also have to focus on the violence part, for to talk about gun violence requires you to talk about both, and the violence part is the one that goes well beyond an easy government solution and entails all kinds of different aspects of modern life that we are still grappling with.
I hope we can start to figure it out. I haven't had the time, frankly, in less than 18 hours, to bring to the floor a proposal for how we will move forward or what the forum will be for this conversation to even begin. I know we can no longer just chalk it up to just isolated incidents because it has happened too often. Sadly, I believe it will happen again until we confront it and try to solve it. I hope we will, and I believe we can. I believe we must, for, as I said at the outset and will say in conclusion, it goes to the core of why we even exist to begin with--to keep our people safe no matter how new, how different, or how unique the threat may be.
I yield the floor.