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“LEGISLATIVE SESSION” mentioning Amy Klobuchar was published in the Senate section on pages S1746-S1759 on March 24.
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LEGISLATIVE SESSION
______
PPP EXTENSION ACT OF 2021--MOTION TO PROCEED
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Cloture having been invoked, the Senate will resume legislative session and the motion to proceed to H.R. 1799, which the clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 11, H.R. 1799, an act to amend the Small Business Act and the CARES Act to extend the covered period for the paycheck protection program, and for other purposes.
PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Order of Business
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following morning business tomorrow, Thursday, March 25, all postcloture time on the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 11, H.R. 1799, the PPP Extension Act, be considered expired and the motion to proceed be agreed to; that the only amendments in order be the following: Kennedy, No. 1401; Rubio, No. 1405; further, that it be in order for Senator Paul or his designee to raise a Budget Act point of order; finally, that at 11 a.m. tomorrow, the Senate vote in relation to the amendments in the order listed and on the motion to waive, if made; that if the motion to waive is agreed to, the bill be considered read a third time and the Senate vote on passage of the bill as amended, if amended, with 60 affirmative votes required for passage, all with no intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
Gun Violence
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, it is hard to believe that I am on this floor again after losing 10 more people, this time in Boulder, CO, to another horrible mass shooting in our State.
I am sure the Presiding Officer doesn't remember that last week, after the events in Atlanta, I went over to his desk, and I said that we were so sorry in Colorado for what had happened in Atlanta, and then, just 3 or 4 days later, it happened again in Colorado.
I have spent the last day learning about the victims of this terrible crime, and I want America to know what extraordinary human beings we have lost in my State. Here they are.
Denny Stong, age 20. Denny was a graduate of Fairview High School, an introverted, smart kid who loved history and model airplanes.
He had been covering shifts at the King Soopers and took enormous pride in his role as an essential worker during this pandemic. He once posted on Facebook, ``I can't stay home. I am a Grocery Store Worker.''
Neven Stanisic, age 23. Neven's dad said he was, ``a really good boy, a good kid . . . a hard-working boy.''
His parents are refugees from Bosnia, who left in the 1990s to escape the war. The reverend at their local church said: ``His family fled the war . . . and everything they had was either left behind or destroyed.
``They left everything to save their lives, and came here to have a new start,'' said the pastor.
They came to America to have a new start, only to have their son's life ended by this senseless act of violence.
Rikki Olds was 25 years old. Rikki had been working as a manager at King Soopers for 6 years. Her family described her as a ``firecracker'' who lit up a room with her infectious giggle. Her Aunt Lori said: ``She had a beautiful way of just being her. . . . When you're down, she just wanted to cheer you up, just by being around.''
Tralona Bartkowaik, age 49. She co-owned a clothing and accessory store, Umba Love, with her sister, and was a frequent presence in the Boulder arts and music scene.
She had a deep curiosity about the world that took her on travel from Nepal to Costa Rica. Her younger brother remembers her as ``a beam of light.''
Teri Leiker, age 51. She was a huge fan of the Buffalos at CU, a regular face at the Pearl Street Stampede. A friend called Teri ``the most selfless, innocent, amazing person I have had the honor of meeting.''
Suzanne Fountain, 59 years old. She worked for 15 years in the Boulder Community Hospital. She loved gardening and was passionate about music and theater. A friend described her as ``the cream of the crop and a good person, a good soul.''
Kevin Mahoney, age 61. Kevin had worked in the hotel business but retired early to spend more time traveling, skiing, and visiting his daughter Erika.
After learning of her father's death, Erica wrote: ``My dad represents all things Love. I am so thankful he could walk me down the aisle last summer.''
Lynn Murray, age 62. Lynn was a mother of two and a retired photo director for prominent national magazines.
Her husband John said: ``I just want her to be remembered as this amazing, amazing comet, spending 62 years flying across the sky.''
Jody Waters, 65 years old. Jody owned a boutique clothing store named Applause on Pearl Street Mall, where she remembered all her customers and their favorite brands. She was a mother of two and a grandmother who loved horses and hiking. A friend said: When Jody walked into the room, ``she was a breath of fresh air, a light.''
Finally, Officer Eric Talley. He is 51 years old. He is a man of deep faith and a devoted father of seven. After losing a close friend to a DUI, he joined the police academy at age 40, just 11 years ago, to give back to the community.
In 2013, he made headlines when he helped rescue 11 ducklings from a drainage ditch.
Eric's father said: He ``loved his kids and family more than anything.'' For their sake he was hoping to stay off the frontlines by learning to become a drone operator. But when the bullets rang out, he rushed into action, first on the scene, saving countless lives at the cost of his own.
Officer Talley and these other folks represent the best of Colorado, and we certainly owe Officer Talley a debt of gratitude that we will never be able to repay.
My heart goes out to all the families and the entire community of Boulder. We have endured too many tragedies in this State. So many other States are the same here.
The shootings at Columbine High School happened right before my oldest daughter was born, Caroline. She is 21 years old, and her entire generation has grown up in the shadow of gun violence--something none of us had to do.
I remember after a gunman in Las Vegas took the lives of 59 Americans. That Monday I came to work and realized during the course of the day that I was having meeting after meeting after meeting, and nobody was mentioning the massacre of 59 Americans. I don't know if it was two or three or four of these events before that that we began to somehow accept this as normal--that we can lose that many people and not have a conversation about what had happened, the headlines all moving on to the next thing.
We can't allow this to become normal, and it is not just the mass shootings. It is the daily shootings. The Presiding Officer and I talked about it last week, what happened in Atlanta over the last couple of weekends, or on the West Side of Chicago. So we can't move on.
Boulder will heal, but this scar will always be there. My daughter's generation will always bear the burden of a national government that did nothing to protect them. They and the children that I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools carry a burden that we didn't carry. They have grown up with a reasonable fear that they will be shot in their classrooms or in their schools or at a movie theater or in any public place.
I didn't grow up in an America with more gun-related deaths than virtually any country in this world, and we can't accept it for their America. I am not asking anybody here to show the courage that Officer Talley showed or the other men and women of law enforcement who constantly have to deal with the inability of this place's capacity to deal with these issues. I am just asking us to show an ounce of their courage by doing whatever we can to keep weapons of war out of our community, to pass universal background checks, to limit the size of magazines, and to address the epidemic crisis of mental health in this country. It seems like that would be the least that we could do.
In the wake of one of these incidents, I heard somebody say on a radio program that this is just the price of freedom, that these murders are the price of freedom. What a shame that somebody would say that and mean it. What a surrender that represents to our children and to the victims of these crimes. What a sacrifice of their right to be free from fear
Who are we to insist that they live terrified in their own country? Nobody insisted that we live that way.
But our failure to act has helped create these conditions, and we can't wait any longer. The Senate needs to act. There is nobody else to act but the U.S. Senate.
I want to end by thanking my colleagues from Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal and Senator Murphy, for their incredibly steadfast leadership for long before they came to the Senate. But I remember one of the darkest moments of my Senate career, the votes that we took after Newtown, when that elementary school, Sandy Hook, was shot up and 20 students were killed, and this Senate couldn't even pass universal background checks. They are here tonight to continue to make the case that we need to act, and I want to again thank them for their resilience and for caring about the people who lived and died in Colorado. I am extremely grateful for their example.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my friend Senator Bennet for those remarks, for honoring the memories of those we have lost and commanding us to action.
I remember getting a phone call from Michael Bennet that Friday morning as Senator Blumenthal and I were sitting at a firehouse in Sandy Hook, CT, learning what had happened just around the corner at a schoolhouse.
I remember getting advice from Michael Bennet about what you do as an elected official in the midst of this tragedy because he had already been through it once before. Colorado had already been through it more than once before.
I think about this macabre club that an increasing number of Members of the Senate and House belong to in which we have this memory bank of what to do when a mass shooting happens in your district or your State--a set of capacities that no Member of the House or Senate, no Governor ever had to think about or ever consider possessing decades ago. Now, we call each other when these things happen to impart advice as to how to be helpful to communities that are grieving.
I am thankful to have friends like Senator Bennet, who can be with others at moments like this, but I hate the fact that he knows all too well what communities go through when something happens like happened earlier this week in Boulder.
We thought about what to do to try to move this country and our colleagues to action after another spate of mass shootings. This is a really old chart that I brought down to the floor for years. These numbers are out of date, unfortunately, because, well, in 2019, we were losing 100 people a day from gun violence. That is not the number from 2020 or 2021. We have seen a dramatic increase in gun violence.
While in 2020 we didn't see the mass shootings that we have been accustomed to in years prior, we are now seeing them once again pop up on our TV screens in 2021. But the lack of mass shootings masked the reality, which was a dramatic increase in the number of people who were felled by guns over the course of last year. We thought about what we could do to try to make more real for our colleagues the scope of this epidemic, and we thought of maybe something simple, you know, to make people understand that these aren't really numbers. The numbers are just a way to explain in aggregate who these people are, because each one of them is an individual. Each one of them led a life. Each one of them had people who loved them. Each one of them loved people. So many of them, you can just see by these snapshots, were young. They had full lives ahead of them, businesses to start, and families to begin. None of that happened for them because they were shot, often at the beginning or the peak of their early life.
So tonight I am hopeful that I will be joined by a number of my colleagues to do something simple, just to read into the Record, the permanent Congressional Record, the names of those who have died just in 2021. Every single day, there are over 100 people dying right now. I don't think America has ever seen this rate of gun violence, with the exception of wartime, in our history.
While we won't have time to tell you the story of all these people, as Michael did about those whom we lost in Boulder, at least we can make sure that forever their name and a link to their story is in the Congressional Record.
Senator Bennet already talked about Lynn Murray and Suzanne Fountain, Teri Leiker, Kevin Mahoney, Tralona Bartkowiak, Rikki Olds, Neven Stanisic, Denny Stong, Jody Waters, and Eric Talley. Those are the victims from Colorado. I am sorry if I didn't get the pronunciations perfectly. But we also lost, over the course of the first 3 months of this year Patrice Lynette Jones in Indiana; Kelvin Darnell from Illinois; Kevon Dickerson from Kentucky; Leah Brooke Hines from Ohio; Linda McMurry in Tennessee; Michael Uttley in Missouri; Jarrea Gardner in Pennsylvania; Robert Randall Turner III from Maryland; Maddox Jones in Georgia; Joseph Jackson in Florida.
On Monday, the same day as the shooting, in Boulder, Alessia Mesquita, 28 years old, was shot and killed in New Haven, CT, with her 1-year-old daughter sitting in the back seat of her car. She and her boyfriend were arguing in the car when he shot her to death. According to her mother, Alessia had been trying to leave her boyfriend.
Alessia is described as a devoted mother who loved her children with all of her heart. Many of her friends really relied on her for advice and guidance. They said she would give the shirt off her back to help a friend.
Her mom said:
My heart has been shattered, and I don't think I'm ever going to be right again.
She was the second of eight children. She had two children of her own, and her mother will now raise her two grandchildren.
Nobody heard about Alessia Mesquita being shot with her daughter in the back seat in New Haven, CT, on Monday. Her life isn't less valuable than any of those who were killed in mass shootings. But this country's attention to the pandemic of gun violence, the epidemic of gun violence, seems to surface only when there is a mass shooting.
Benjamin Bagley was shot last week in Bridgeport, CT. He was 22 years old. He was remembered by friends and family as somebody who always kept a smile on the faces of people who loved him. He was a doting father. He was a loving son and brother and always made people smile.
His friends wrote:
He was taken from us far before his light was fully able to shine its brightest.
He was one of six siblings, two brothers and four sisters. He had two children and one on the way. He was born and raised in Bridgeport. He was involved in his church.
His mom Michelle Brown said:
I had to kiss my son lying in a hospital bed dead. I don't wish this on nobody, not even my worst enemy.
This wasn't the first time Benjamin had been shot. He had been previously wounded in a shooting in 2016, but he had recovered.
Kevin Jang was 26 years old. About a month and a half ago, in early February, he was killed by gun violence. He had moved to New Haven just 2 years ago to pursue a master's degree at the Yale School of the Environment. He was a west coast native. He had gotten engaged 1 week before his death. He had earned a degree. He was an Army veteran. He was a present Army National Guard member.
He was shot outside his fiance's apartment. His fiance said:
Kevin was . . . a gift from God. He was a true and righteous man after God's own heart. Life is so precious and short. My only hope is that he is with his Heavenly Father now in perfect peace.
``An extraordinary young man,'' said Yale University's president.
I mean, I have a stack of names, 20, 25 per page. We don't have enough time tonight to read into the Record the number of victims of gun violence in 2021 alone--alone. There is Adam Todd Saeed from South Carolina; Andrew Wesley from Ohio; Antonio Rowban Thompson from South Carolina; Artrell Conner, Louisiana; Beau Michael Wasmer, West Virginia; Brittany Wagoner-Moore in Ohio; Byron ``B'' Donnell Ross in Texas; Carolyn Ann Stephenson, North Carolina; Christian Parra, New Jersey; Christopher Bess, Illinois; David Caballero, California; David Prince, Illinois; Dean Wagstaff, Washington; Devin Dawkins, Missouri; Dolores Reyes, California; Eric Thompson, Tennessee; Glorida Dean Eddington Lewis, Ohio; Harold Edward Dennison, West Virginia; Javontae Hendricks, Illinois; Jeffrey Gillespie, Mississippi; Justin Bartley Williams, Texas; Keldrick Love, Louisiana; Kiron Golden, Alabama; Lesean Long, Illinois; Malcolm Fitts, Illinois; Marcel Tramon Pimpton, Texas; Mario Vines, Oklahoma; Melissa Marie Nease, Florida; Nestor Gregorio, Texas; Pedro Arturo Delgado Tagle, Texas; Rene Hernandez, Texas; Robert ``Trey'' Scott III, Indiana; Ryan Abraham Whiteis-Saks, Minnesota; Satnam Singh, Utah; Shamso Gedi-Abdi, Minnesota; Teresa Ratliff, Ohio; Thomas ``TJ'' Carr, Ohio; Timothy Alfred Nelson, Texas; Timothy Dugar Ohio; Tony Nichols, Missouri; Tre'Veon D. Buckner; Victor Zuniga; Xavier Crosby; Adam David-Lawrence Arrambide; Bobby King; Brandon Chunko; Carol Tinsley; Cecilia Apolo; Christian Joseph Jones; Christopher Benton McLeod; Cory McHaffie; Curtis Lee Upshaw; DeAndre Carter; Dominicko Howell; Donnell Hoskin; Grayson Babbs; Jamie Bull. It is two pages. I have 20 more here. My colleagues will hopefully join me on the floor tonight to read some of these names into the Record.
This is as astonishing as it is heartbreaking. This country allows for this to happen, allows these individuals to effectively be nameless and to be anonymous. Tonight we are reading into the Record only the names of individuals who died in this year, and the year isn't even 90 days old. How is it that we pay attention during the mass shootings but just sleep through the days in which all of these people are stolen from us through an epidemic that is preventable?
This doesn't happen anywhere else in the high-income world. No other nation permits this level of gun violence. Don't tell me it is the price of admission to America. Don't tell me it is not preventable. Don't tell me it is inevitable. It only happens here. It only happens here, and it is really hard to comprehend the impact this has on people.
I was in an elementary school in Baltimore, MD, about 2 years ago. I had gone there to see an afterschool program that I had heard was very successful. The school had started about an hour late that day because of a weather delay, and so when I was inside the school, at about 10 o'clock, kids were still just arriving.
I went upstairs to join the young lady who ran this program, and we were about a half an hour into our conversation when buzzers started going off, and the lights flickered, and the intercom system lit up with somebody from the central office repeating over and over again: Code green, code green, code green.
I didn't know what a code green was. The person I was meeting with, who was just running this afterschool program, didn't know what code green was.
Luckily, the front office called up and told us that ``code green'' means there has been an active shooting somewhere in and around the school and that everybody needs to turn the lights off, lock the doors, and shut the blinds. So that is what we did.
It was 10:30 in the morning. After about 20 minutes, code green ended, lights turned back on, and we continued our discussion. I was shaken.
This is a school I had never set foot in. I had only been there about 20 minutes, and there was an active shooting within a handful of blocks. So I wanted to know what happened. I stayed in touch with personnel at the school. I read the Baltimore papers over the course of the next few days to find out what had happened, and here is what I found out. A young man by the name of Corey Dodd, who lived just down the street from the school, had told his wife--I believe her name is Marissa, if I remember correctly--that he would drop their twins off at Matthew Henson Elementary School that morning. They had two other kids. She was busy with them. He said: I will drop the kids off this morning.
So he drove the kids to Matthew Henson Elementary School, the twin girls, and brought them into the building. I could have been in that lobby with him that morning as I was coming in and he was leaving. He got into his car. He drove a few blocks home, and in between his car and the door, he was shot dead--10 o'clock in the morning.
His little girl, the youngest, always waited for him at the door when he was arriving. Well, he never showed up to that door because he died that day. And his two little twin girls in that school at the same time that I was there, who might have been giggling as they took a break from instruction and the lights went off, and they got to chat with their friends, didn't know that they were never going to see their father again.
Think about it, how the lives of those children change when their dad vanishes from the Earth just like that. Think about how the lives of all the children in that school change when they have to contemplate the fact that their dads might not be home when they arrive next week or the week after, if it could happen to Mr. Dodd. Think about how the entire neighborhood goes through trauma after trauma when that happens so routinely in a place like Baltimore.
You can't understand the scope of this epidemic by just reading off these names. Adam Todd Saeed died. Jason Wilson died. Jath Burns died. Johnjairo Brito died. Johnnie Clark died. Jonathan Joseph died. Jose Medero died. Joseph Carney died. Justin Locklear died. Justin Marshall died of gun violence. So did Kristen Slack and Latarous Harris and Lieutenant Justin Bedwell.
They all died of gunshot wounds just in 2021, but they simply represent the surface. You scratch just a bit, and you will find their kids and their moms and their dads and their neighbors who are going through trauma right now because of their deaths.
Research tells us that often there are 20 people who experience definable trauma when someone close to them dies. And so even the names that we read into the record tonight don't accurately represent the scope of this trauma. Those kids' lives will never ever be the same in Sandtown, the neighborhood of Baltimore in which this elementary school sits, neither will be the lives of those kids who go to that school.
And maybe what was so inexplicable to me was that I had to work really hard to find out anything about that young man. It was barely a story the next day that he had died bringing his daughters to school and then returning home. Had there been six more people shot, maybe it would have made the papers. Maybe America would have paid attention.
But think of it this way: What if that same story played out not in Baltimore, MD, with an African-American father and African-American girls, what if that story played out in Westport, CT, with a White father and two twin, blond-haired, White girls? Do we care less because Corey was African American? You better believe it. You better believe that headline news would have been running stories about an affluent, White, suburban father dropping his kids off at an affluent, White, suburban school and being shot before he entered his suburban home.
We don't care about individual loss of life like we care about the victims of mass shootings. That is a tragedy. We also don't care about the loss of Black life. We don't care about the people of color who die in the same way that we care when White people die in this country. That is just the truth.
So, tonight, my colleagues and I are going to come to the floor--and I hope some will join me. I thank Senator Blumenthal for being here to start us off--to read into the Record the names of individuals who have been lost to gun violence in 2021 as a way to make sure we recognize who they were and the lives that they led, but also as a last-gasp effort to try to convince our colleagues to do something.
Tonight isn't really going to be the night to go deep into policy. Senator Bennet talked about what we know we need to do. We can have that debate at another time. Tonight is a night to just recognize the scope of this epidemic, how many people are being lost, how many lives are being impacted in mass shootings and in individual acts of violence, in homicides and suicides and domestic violence incidences. And maybe, maybe by pounding into people's brains the human toll of this tragedy in mass shootings and in other forms, we can inch this body a little bit closer to doing the right thing.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am honored to follow my colleagues Senators Murphy and Bennet, two fellow champions of this cause.
Again, again, we have stood here so many times to advocate for measures that very simply would make Americans safe.
And I don't accept that it will be our last gasp. I don't accept that we will ever go away, that we will ever abandon this cause, no matter how long and how hard it is.
Senator Murphy and I were in Sandy Hook the afternoon of that massacre. We went through an excruciatingly heartbreaking, gut-
wrenching, stunning experience, but nothing compared to the children who were taken out of the school. Nothing compared to the teachers who shepherded them. Nothing compared to anyone who lived through it or the emergency responders who had to see the scene of carnage that day and, of course, nothing approaching the trauma of parents and loved ones.
So our club, as he called it, is one that pales in significance to the club of survivors and victims. It is more than the names we read tonight. It is the children who take cover when that code is rung. It is the teachers who suffer the apprehension of wondering whether that day will be the one when there is a shooter. It is the parents of all children who send their kids to school and wonder whether, at the end of the day, they will see them again. At some level, maybe not all, maybe not always, not every day, but that fear in the gut, that powerfully important apprehension is there for many.
When I was in elementary school, the fear was of nuclear annihilation. And the drills we did were to dive beneath our desks, as though somehow those desks could be protected in the midst of a nuclear attack. Absurd as it seems looking back, every one of us, during those years, wondered would that be the day. And on the days before the Cuban missile crisis, it became more real than ever.
And for that generation, it was the fear For this generation, gun violence is the fear that lurks constantly in the heart, in the back of the mind, and always a presence.
The names that we are going to read tonight are a very partial list of the injuries because we are reading the ones who died, but many others were injured severely and horrifically: bones shattered, flesh torn, futures changed forever, and, of course, the emotional trauma of living through it. But we have to read these names because it is part of our responsibility to make them real and to remind ourselves, as much as anyone, that this issue is a matter of life and death in the way that few others that we debate in this Chamber evoke.
At the beginning of the Judiciary Committee hearing the other day, just this week, we had a moment of silence. But we cannot be silent. Yes, we will offer thoughts and prayers, but we cannot be silent, and we must do more than speak. We must act--honor with action.
We cannot let these brave, wonderful souls go gently into this good night. We must rage, rage against the dying of the life. And that is what we are doing by reading these names, reminding ourselves that we cannot accept these deaths as a normal. Even with the pandemic receding, we hope, the epidemic of gun violence continues.
A gun, a firearm, especially an assault weapon, makes fatal and irreversible some of the most serious problems. Whether it is domestic violence, suicide, or simply a profoundly disturbed young man walking into a grocery store, or a racist and misogynist man going into a spa, the involvement of guns and firearms makes those incidents deadly.
The names that I will read will be of all ethnicities and religions and backgrounds and races because firearms can be an equal opportunity killer. But Senator Murphy is right that communities of color suffer disproportionately. And in Atlanta, who can doubt that a hate crime turned deadly, potentially, because of that gun.
Dominick Boston, Brad Keel, Ildiko Papp, James Ray Huddleston, Glenda Swain Toms, Kayla Marie Keatts, Ethan Delicat, Paula Marie Booth, Raymond Robinson, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Hyun Jung Grant, Daoyou Feng, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, Xiaojie Tan, Young Ae Yue, Paul Andre Michels.
Last week, eight lives were taken by gun violence, and they should be remembered and their lives counted.
Delaina Ashley Yaun was a 33-year-old newlywed and mother of two, including a daughter she gave birth to this summer. She put her family above all else and cared for family members and friends who needed help or a place to stay during tough times.
Her manager said:
Her heart was so big. She loved people.
He describes how she would feed diners at the restaurant where she worked who were homeless and bring them home to offer them showers and clean clothes.
One friend described Delaina as ``a light. She just made everybody happy. She loves to smile and joke and hang out with her kids and make sure they always had fun. She was a happy person.''
Hyun Jung Grant was 51 years old. She worked as a schoolteacher in South Korea before immigrating to the United States. She was a hard-
working and loving single mother of two, who loved karaoke, dancing, and electronic music, and made the world's best kimchi stew.
One of her sons, Randy, wrote:
She was a single mother who dedicated her whole life to providing for my brother and I. It is only my brother and I in the United States. . . . She was one of my best friends and the strongest influence on who we are today.
Daoyou Feng was 44 years old. What we know about her from her friends is that she was sweet and kind. That is how she was described by her coworkers as well.
Soon Chung Park was an active 74-year-old mother and mother-in-law. She lived in Atlanta. She moved there several years ago to be closer to friends. And she was well on her way to living past 100. Because of the pandemic, she missed chances to visit her family in the Northeast but was planning to move back this summer to be closer to relatives and friends.
Her son-in-law described that Soon ``just liked to work. It wasn't for the money. She just wanted a little bit of work for her life.''
Suncha Kim, 69 years old. She was married for more than 50 years, and she was a fighter and a rock for her two children and three grandchildren. She was a hard worker and enjoyed line dancing.
Suncha came to the United States around 1980. She spoke little English and worked two to three jobs, putting her children first and always seeking to help others. She volunteered by cooking and fundraising. One of her grandchildren wrote:
My grandmother was an angel. . . . As an immigrant, all my grandmother ever wanted in life was to grow old with my grandfather and watch her children and grandchildren live the life she never got to live.
Xiaojie Tan, killed that day, before her 50th birthday. She was a dedicated wife, mother, friend. She was devoted to her job and dedicated to her fellow employees. Her husband said:
She donated and gave money to her employees and treated them so well. She was always celebrating their birthdays, doing good things for them.
She was curious, hard-working, and caring, always filled with joy. She worked long hours, every day, to give her family a better life. Her daughter said that Xiao was her best friend and that ``[s]he did everything for me and the family. She provided everything.''
Yong Ae Yue, 63 years old. She was an amazing mother of two sons and loved to cook Korean food. She came to the United States in the 1970s, and after being laid off during the pandemic, she was excited to be back at work. She enjoyed visiting friends, watching movies and soap operas, and reading. She always loved to read and have her dog at her side.
Paul Andre Michels. He was a 54-year-old Army veteran, one of nine children, and he had been married for more than 20 years. He loved to fish and collect rare coins. He treated everyone like he was their uncle and did what he could to help others.
One friend said of Paul that ``[h]e would give you the shirt off his back.''
His younger brother, John, said:
He'd loan you money if you needed it sometimes. You never went away from his place hungry.
My home State of Connecticut is not immune to gun violence. Sandy Hook is the best known of the tragedies, but there are others--many, many, many others--all around the State, in big cities, in small towns, in rural areas, suburban.
Nobody is immune. Nobody is protected against gun violence so long as the pipeline, the iron pipeline, even with Connecticut's strong laws, draws guns across State borders.
Here are some of the names and stories of people whose lives have been taken in Connecticut:
Jaqhawn Walters was killed on September 19, 2020, in Hartford. He was 24 years old. His mother Trician writes:
There was an altercation with someone inside a store. The fight was broken up, but the other young man still shot him and then stood over him a second time and shot him again.
Jaqhawn was a college graduate. He was known as a big basketball player for Albertus Magnus. He played overseas for two seasons before COVID hit.
My son saw a lot of gun violence growing up in the city, and he became victim to it even though he tried his best to beat all odds with a bachelor's degree in communications.
He even played in Argentina as a professional basketball player, mentored kids through basketball. He got a proclamation for his work at the Parker Memorial Center and the Village, where he worked with troubled kids.
Jaqhawn's coach at Albertus Magnus described him as ``the type of kid that got along with everyone. His likability crossed every age generation. When I ran camp, 8-year-old kids, instantly, he was the guy. They'd all gravitate toward him. Same thing with our team. They loved him. Opponents loved him. I've gotten a lot of texts, and I got one from a Northeast coach who said, `He had that thing where he'd drop 30 [points] on you, and every opponent not only respected him but genuinely liked him.' ''
Another coach said:
Jaqhawn was very, very rooted in the Hartford community, and he loved his town. So he was always going to be one of those people that came back and gave as much as he was able.
Another coach said:
He had such an impact. The guy had so much more to give.
That is the story of every one of these victims: so much more to give; so much more to give back, whether to Hartford or sons and daughters or parents.
Ethan Song was killed in Guilford on January 31, 2018, 12 days after his 15th birthday, with an unsecured firearm in his neighbor's house. He lived a life filled with laughter, adventure, and passion. He lived with adoring family members Kristin and Michael Song.
Ethan loved to ski and hike and play spikeball too. He helped his mom Kristin in finding homes for abandoned puppies. Ethan loved food. He and his dad Mike ventured to find the best lobster roll in New England. They sampled 15 locations.
He loved lacrosse, and he was good at it, making the all-star team one season. He was always interested in his family's history. He tried to learn all that he could about his grandmother's experience as a Holocaust survivor and went so far as to divert a family trip to the UK to see the Anne Frank house in the Netherlands.
Ethan was also fascinated by his grandfather's experience as a decorated intelligence officer in the Korean war.
I am always so inspired by Kristin and Michael Song and Ethan's sister, their strength and courage, their joy in life, and their unquenchable loyalty and love for Ethan. I have stood on the green in Guilford announcing my introduction of Ethan's Law, a safe storage law that they have championed with grace and dignity and power beyond words.
And let's say it out loud: This gun violence is every parent's worst nightmare, every parent's worst fear--going to school, going to a neighbor's house, going to a grocery store--wrong place at the wrong time: a neighbor's house where a firearm was unsafely stored, watching the emergency response team pull to that neighbor's house and knowing something is terribly, terribly wrong. Every parent's worst nightmare.
And Lori Jackson's parents know very graphically about that nightmare because their daughter, Lori Jackson, of Oxford, CT, came to their house seeking refuge from an estranged husband. And that night, while her infant children slept, Lori Jackson was gunned down by that husband, who was under a protective order which should have barred his having a firearm, but at that point Connecticut law applied only to permanent protective orders.
She was killed by that man even though he was under a protective order. She was 32 years old. She was a loving daughter and a mother of twins. And her mother also was severely injured.
And her parents, with that same grace and dignity and strength and courage, have championed protection for domestic violence victims and survivors.
She had so much to give--like Ethan, like so many others.
And we remember Noah, Charlotte, Jack, Olivia, Dylan, Catherine, Avielle, Jessica, James, Josephine, Caroline, Benjamin, Chase, Ana, Grace, Emilie, Madeleine, Allison, Daniel, and Jesse--20 beautiful, innocent children taken at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown more than 8 years ago.
We remember them for bringing bursts of light and laughter into the lives of their family and friends, for bringing love into the lives of all who knew them, and for their joy and boundless energy. Only 6 years old, but they had so much to give, and their lives cut short at Sandy Hook that day.
And we remember the heroism of those brave, courageous educators that December morning: Victoria, Lauren, Anne Marie, Rachel, Mary, and Dawn. We remember their courage, some of them physically shielding students with their own bodies, running unhesitatingly toward danger, barricading classrooms, drawing on all their reserves of calm and professionalism to protect and shield the children in their care.
We read these names, I feel, almost as a form of prayer. We cannot save any of these victims, but we know we can save others. And that is our work.
As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural speech, ``here on earth God's work must truly be our own.'' Thank you.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Nevada.
Ms. CORTEZ MASTO. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues. At this juncture, it is hard to find the words. How many more shootings, how many more individuals have to die before we take action? And I rise because the Senator--my colleague, the great Senator from Connecticut--was identifying these names as a form of prayer, which I could not have said that better, because this is about recognizing those we have lost in order to prevent future loss of life.
So I join them to recognize individuals across the country and in my home State of Nevada who have lost their lives: Vincent Brown of Colorado; Zaimier Bell of New Jersey; Anthony Stanley of Missouri; Bao Yang, Minnesota; Daisy Navarrete of Texas; David Camacho, Rhode Island; Deonte Minor, Washington, DC; Ronald B. Williams from Indiana. All of these individuals were killed by gun violence. And just those names would be too many. Yet they represent a few and a heartbreakingly long list of victims, families, and communities whose lives have been ripped apart by senseless gun violence just this year.
Sadly, my home State of Nevada has been no stranger to this pain. In Las Vegas, on October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire on a crowd of thousands of people at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. He killed 58 people that night. Two more victims have since died from injuries they received that evening. And hundreds, hundreds more were injured--
people who just wanted to enjoy an evening of celebration with their friends and family.
I know the fear and the trauma that so many families experienced that day. My niece was at that concert, and my family and I are incredibly grateful that she made it home safely. But I will never forget--never forget--on that Monday after the horrific shooting that took place, sitting at the Reconciliation Center in Las Vegas with the families, with the parents, the uncles, the aunts, the siblings, who were waiting to find out what happened to their loved one.
Can you imagine? It is the most horrific thing any family member could go through. You are waiting to hear what happened to your family member--your child, your son, daughter, your niece, your nephew, your father, your mother--and you are hoping that as time and the clock ticks away, your child is not one that is in the backroom with a coroner right now.
I cannot tell you how heartbreaking it was to be with those families and talking to them and the fear and the anxiety and the helplessness and the hope that still they clung to that they would find out that their child or their brother or their mother or sister was really safe somewhere in one of the hospitals in Las Vegas.
No one can imagine that, and no one should have to imagine it. And no one should ever have to go through that. But that is what families and loved ones have been going through over the years because of the senseless gun violence that is happening across this country.
Every day, more than 100 families lose a loved one to gun violence. Austin Cooper Meyer, age 24, from Sparks, NV; Brennan Lee Stewart, age 30, from North Las Vegas; Cameron Lee Robinson, age 28, from Las Vegas; Charleston Hartfield, age 34, from Henderson, NV, a police officer; Erick Steven Silva, age 21, from Las Vegas; Laura Ann Shipp, age 50, from Las Vegas; Neysa Christina Tonks, age 46, from Las Vegas; Quinton Joe Robbins, age 20, from Henderson--those are just 8 of the 60 Americans who lost their lives during the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, and their names and stories will stick with us forever.
But we also have to remember the loved ones they have left behind. So many of these names I know now not just because of the horrific shooting but because I have met their family members whom they have left behind--children who were left behind, children who lost their parent to this horrific gunfire, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. It just goes on and on and on.
In the next few minutes, I want to share some stories of Nevadans whose lives have been altered by gun violence. Many of these stories are heartbreaking, and they stem from the October 1 mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas.
Before I talk about them, however, I have to also recognize and praise the many heroes who stood up and worked to protect our community that night.
After the bullets stopped raining down on the Las Vegas Strip, a former marine turned a truck into a makeshift ambulance and drove more than two dozen people to one of our hospitals. A couple provided CPR to injured victims on the site. And hundreds of concertgoers risked their lives carrying fellow concertgoers to safety.
In fact, many younger attendees already had a sense of what to do to stop the bleeding from bullet holes and knew to run for safety in the breaks in between the sounds o gunshots because of training they had received in their schools and workplaces.
But after the shooting, I received a letter from a constituent who survived the Las Vegas shooting, and she wrote:
On October 1st, 2017, our life was forever changed. . . . My husband and I attended the Route 91 Harvest Festival. We were having the time of our lives, enjoying the different bands we got to see and singing along with all our favorite songs. [My husband] and I were so moved when [one of the bands] led the audience singing God Bless America. Who would have known that just a few hours later our lives would be changed forever?
When the shooting . . . started, I thought it was firecrackers. We looked around and then there were more shots. My husband pulled me to the ground, laying on top of me, shielding me from gunfire. He laid there tense waiting to be shot while I laid there waiting for him to go limp. We prayed and told each other we loved [one] another. I prayed we would live to see our children raise their children and I felt Jesus' hands covering us. During a pause in the shooting, my husband pulled me up to start running. I was terrified, [because] we could hear bullets whizzing by and
[we] could smell gun powder. There were three people, that I know of, who were shot right around us. The shooting continued for what felt like forever. We continued running and ran across Las Vegas Boulevard while the shooting continued. There was so much confusion and we didn't know if there were more shooters.
By the grace of God, my husband [and] I are unharmed physically. Our emotional scars are still to be determined. Sleeping has been difficult. I have had periods of uncontrollable shaking. I have chronic stomach pain and have
. . . difficulty eating. All of this seems trivial compared to the families who have lost mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters and the hundreds of people still suffering with physical injuries.
Now, I read that letter because it is not just, as I have said before, about the lives we have lost, but it is about the lives who are affected by gun violence. Reading that letter is just heartbreaking--
and to think that her trauma is experienced by so many other Americans from Las Vegas, from Parkland, from Orlando, and from Boulder. It is a stain on our Nation.
And I have, since that shooting, been able to meet so many incredible survivors of this shooting, including two sisters, the Marano sisters, who were at the concert that night and are still living with the emotional scars from being there in that horrific shooting.
Geena Marano has learned to prepare herself for Independence Day and New Year's Eve, when the sounds of fireworks can sound eerily similar to gunfire. But if a car backfires unexpectedly, she has to start the process of reminding herself: ``You're safe. It's OK. Don't worry.''
And her sister Marisa, who was also at the festival, says her own daughter has picked up on the habit of reacting to loud noises. She said: ``It breaks my heart because my trauma has [now] passed on to her.''
The fear resurfaces for these sisters in so many situations: on anniversaries, including of all the shootings since then; at high schools, where Geena was doing outreach to students and feared that she was putting herself at risk of another shooting; passing the Strip, eerily during the COVID pandemic, like it was on the day of the festival, because the Strip was shut down. Anywhere there is darkness and music, even on an evening out, the sisters still feel the repercussions of that night at the concert.
And they are not alone. While the tragedy of the Route 91 shooting may be 3 years behind us, for many survivors a moment can bring it all roaring back, and many more live in fear that it could happen again.
Telemachus Orfanos, a survivor of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, was killed when a gunman entered the Borderline Bar & Grill and shot 12 innocent people on November 7, 2018.
What happened to Telemachus and other October 1 survivors in the restaurant that night was a uniquely American phenomenon that we should not be proud of. We keep having these mass shootings in our country, and it is past time that we acted. It is not only what our Nation deserves. It is what these families and these survivors and those who lost their lives deserve.
The Nevadan who shared her October 1 experience with me ended her letter by stating:
I am urging you to pass thoughtful, reasonable controls that will enhance the safety of our society. It is time to take . . . action to protect our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends. Please, do not sit back and do nothing.
And she is right. We cannot sit back and do nothing. We must pass commonsense gun legislation, like universal background checks that we have passed in the State of Nevada. That will help keep Americans safe. We owe it to our friends and families and all of the victims who have already been irrevocably marked by gun violence to take action.
Thank you.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my friend Senator Cortez Masto for that powerful testimony, for sharing some of these stories talking about the impact on families in Las Vegas and throughout her State, and to talk about what this means from a parent's perspective, to think that her own family had to wonder whether their loved one was going to come back from that shooting that dominated the news, to think about how many lives were changed.
Senator Blumenthal made a really important observation earlier and that was that the numbers we are using here, 39,000 people dying a year, and the names that we are reading into the Record, these are the names of the individuals who have died, but what we know is there are hundreds of thousands of others who have survived gunshot wounds. The trauma is different, but it is still serious and acute.
When a loved one is shot, obviously, that comes with a moral disruption to the family that is hard to calculate. Often that injury has lifelong consequences. The individual is bound to a wheelchair, losing the use of legs and arms. These are serious consequences that affect the rest of your life.
While today we are reading into the Record the names of those who have died, this stack represents, I think, just a fraction of those who have died in 2021. It could be four times as high if we had talked about those who have been injured in episodes of gun violence.
Other colleagues are going to join us here tonight on the floor. While they do, let me just read into the Record a handful of additional names: Carlesa Taylor; Cleveland Sanders; Cortney Smith, Missouri; Corporal Martinus Mitchum from Louisiana; Daniel Bonham from Georgia; Darrell Merriwether from Iowa; Devon Lon Remmel from Minnesota; Diontaye Petty from Kentucky; Gregory Marchand from Missouri; Gwendolyn McMillan from Georgia; Irvinn Villalba from New Mexico; Jakob Lee Haines from Pennsylvania; Jonatan Jose Martinez, Pennsylvania; Julian Castro, Illinois; Julie Lee Karvelis, Mississippi; Keith Hawkins, Arkansas; Lee Patrick David, West Virginia; Manyari Smith, Illinois; Mario Turner, Illinois; Marquise Jones, Louisiana; Nazeer Defares, California; Nicolette Sheridan Law, Pennsylvania; Officer Dominic Jared Winum, Virginia; Peter Vanvallis, Montana; Qualil Terrion Young, Texas; Raymond William Nieman, Kansas; Reginald Copning, Louisiana; Reginald James, California; Robert Bigger, Illinois.
I am sure some cynical viewer tonight may listen to a name they recognize on this list and say: Oh, well, wait a second. I know that guy. He had a criminal record. That individual was involved with some bad people.
There is never a justification for a gun homicide. No matter whether the individuals on these lists were perfect angels or individuals who had made mistakes, none of them deserved to die in an episode of vigilante or random justice. So to answer a hypothetical question, I haven't vetted the names that I am reading because not a single person on this list deserved to go in the way that they did.
I remember talking to a woman who has become a friend in Hartford, CT. She lost her son just about a month before Sandy Hook. She remembers when Sandy Hook happened that she latched onto the number of children who were killed. Twenty kids were killed that day in Sandy Hook. I asked Senator Bennet were there survivors from the shooting in the supermarket in Boulder, and he said he had to check, and I will check as well, but he wasn't sure that there were individuals who were seriously injured. If that is the case, there are parallels to Sandy Hook.
The weapons that are being used in these crimes are so lethal, so powerful that, increasingly, it is hard to survive wounds when a bullet enters your body at the speed that bullets are traveling when they come from an AR-15 or AR-15-style weapon as was used in Sandy Hook.
In Sandy Hook, 20 kids were shot. All 20 of them died. The number 20 wa meaningful to my friend because her son was 20 years old when he was killed on October 20 of 2012, the year of Sandy Hook. He was killed by a 20-year-old, and he was the 20th victim of gun violence that year in Hartford, CT.
She told this story about what her life was like after her son was killed, after Shane was killed. She said that first she just didn't want to leave the house ever. She didn't want to see anybody. She would always walk down the street to the corner bodega to pick up groceries. I think it was only a block or so away. She came to driving there so there was no chance that she would have to meet people she knew along the way. Her life became fundamentally different. Her life ended, as she described it, in so many ways when her only son disappeared from the Earth.
She talked about this strange habit that came to dominate some of her evenings. She would get up in the middle of the night and she would get in her car and she would drive to the site where Shane was shot. Shane was shot about two blocks from my house where I live in Hartford, CT. I drive by the site of Shane's shooting almost every day when I am going back to our home. She would drive to that site. She would stop her car, and she would turn on her high beams as if she were waiting for Shane to show up, as if she were waiting for him to come back. She knew he never was, but this became a habit.
It just speaks to this immense, incalculable trauma that families go through when they lose a loved one, a trauma that you can't truly understand.
In Sandy Hook, one mother adopted another curious but understandable habit in the years after Sandy Hook. She would, during an afternoon on a Saturday or a Sunday, convince herself that her son who had been killed in Sandy Hook was at a friend's house. She would sort of create this fantasy, this fiction in her mind. She would find it a little bit easier to go about cleaning up the house or doing laundry or playing with her other children if, in her mind, she could pretend just for a half hour or an hour that her son was safe at a friend's house. She was successful in contorting her mind to give her that space for that short period of time. It is what she needed to do.
It is something that you never ever want to have to contemplate, creating these fictions in your minds to allow you to survive just for an hour at a time, shining bright lights on an empty space near downtown Hartford, thinking maybe that your son will show up. These are contortions of action and thinking that nobody should have to deal with.
Roshawn Tate from California; Shana Lynn Williams from North Carolina; Stanley Taylor from Missouri; Ty'Reece Thomas from Mississippi; Tyrone Brown from Ohio; Tyrone Gregory from Ohio; Anthony Collins from Georgia; Anthony Milian from Indiana; Antoine Jamil Johnson from Missouri; Brad Rumfield from Texas; Brittany Dawn Scruggs from Texas; Bryan Fundora, Kentucky; Carlesa Taylor, Michigan; Curtis Smith, Oregon; Dae'Vion Pullum, Indiana; Detraio Deshawn Whorton, Alabama; Enelrae Collier Rubenstahl, North Carolina; James Delgiorno, Florida; Jessica Morehouse, Missouri; Jordan Reen, New York; Joseph Marwan Brown, Michigan; Jovanne Hollman, California; Kevin Neal, Georgia; Kimberly Marcum, Ohio; Lentavius Cortez Hall, Louisiana; Leonne Kellam, Delaware; Lovelle Laramore, New Jersey; Luis Rafael Lopez, Arizona; Michael Vines, Michigan.
I apologize if I am mispronouncing some of these names. I am seeing many of them for the first time. But it is important for us to read these names into the Record so that at least they live in that space because the numbers aren't moving our colleagues to action.
So far this year, just 2021, there have been 9,649 gun-related deaths. These include homicides and murders, accidental shootings, and suicides. Some people take issue with the fact that when we talk about the gun violence epidemic, that we are including suicides in these numbers. There have been thousands of suicides in the United States this year, but it is important that we talk about these deaths together.
Again, this evening is not going to be a time to go deep into the question of policy change, but when you do start to explore interventions and causes, you will find that many of the same causes for homicides cause suicides as well.
For instance, there is a very clear correlation between poverty and gun homicide. There is a very clear correlation between poverty and your risk of suicide. There is a clear correlation between the ease of access to a firearm and homicide as there is to suicide. In States that have universal background checks, there are generally lower rates of homicide and there are generally lower rates of suicide as well. We talk about suicides together.
People are paying attention today to this epidemic because of what has happened in Atlanta and what has happened in Colorado. I understand why we pay more attention to mass shootings. There is something unique and frightening about large-scale, indiscriminate slaughter.
But mass shootings are just not those incidences where 10 people die; there are mass shootings where 3 or 4 people are shot. That is still a significant crime. So far, this year, there have been 104 of those. There have been 104 mass shootings this year. You didn't know that, right? You thought there was just Atlanta and Boulder. No, not true. There have been 104 mass shootings.
I believe most times mass shootings are defined as when four or more people are shot at the same time, not necessarily killed but shot. There have been 104 mass shootings this year and 191 deaths and injuries of children aged 11 and younger. Think about that. In this year alone, almost 200 kids, aged 11 and younger, have been killed and 128 deaths and injuries of teenagers, aged 12 to 17.
In May 2020--think about this--there were 61 mass shootings. Now, in May 2020, we were emotionally focused on the pandemic, and we were focused on trying to get people well. The country was not talking about gun violence in the way it normally would if there were 61 mass shooting in 1 month. That is the highest monthly total ever tallied by the Gun Violence Archive, which is a nonprofit research group where a lot of our data and names come from. They began tracking data in 2013. Since they have been tracking the data, May 2020 was the highest number of mass shootings, but you didn't hear about it because most of those mass shootings were of 4 or 5 or 6 people, not of 20 or 30 or 40, and, honestly, many of those mass shootings were likely people of color, which don't get as much attention either.
Mushab Mohamud Ali, Minnesota; Rasaan Mack, Illinois; RoCoby Rodgers, Missouri; Roxann Martinez, Colorado; Samuel Lee Pollard, Mississippi; Steve Alphonso, North Carolina; Terrance Armour, Michigan; Timothy Swope, Illinois; Windy Lee Higgins, Florida; Xzavior Frost, Oklahoma; Anne-Marie Winters Wilson, Georgia; Audrey Isham, Indiana; Cameron Watkins, Virginia.
I am not even close to the 9,649 gun-related deaths in 2021 alone.
I am glad to be joined on the floor by my colleague Senator Klobuchar, to whom I will yield in a moment. I want to thank her for being a real steadfast partner in these efforts and, in particular, on focusing, as she has, on the crime of domestic violence.
Senator Klobuchar, earlier this evening, I was describing a murder in New Haven, CT, that happened on the same day as Colorado's, in which a young woman was sitting in a car with her boyfriend and with her 1-
year-old in the backseat. They were in an argument, and she was trying to leave him, and she shot him while in the car with the child in the backseat. I was talking about how little attention that got in Connecticut, never mind in the country, in how we pay attention to these mass shootings--and for good reason--and how every one of these individuals has a story attached to them. She was someone her friends relied on for counsel and for moral support, and it is how that death initiates so many other traumas.
I was honored to be able to read her name into the Record tonight. She is one of many who will now find their names in the Congressional Record so that, at the very least, the Record of our proceedings will remember her life and think about what could have been had we not been so cavalier with her life and her safety through our inaction.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Senator Murphy so much for those beautiful words.
When you honor the victims as you did, you honor all victims. What I have found about these crimes, particularly the crime of domestic violence, is, so often, the victims have been hidden from view. It is a crime that takes place in someone's bedroom with the door closed. It is a crime that takes place in a house, a crime that no one ever sees. As you know, in a situation like this, when there is a gun, it becomes deadly.
One of my memories is of years ago when a police officer in a small town in Minnesota responded to a domestic violence call. What a lot of people don't know is that, oftentimes, those are the most dangerous calls police officers take. It was a victim--very young--who had called the police, and it was of someone who had severe mental illness problems, her boyfriend. The police went to the door, and the door was answered, and the guy shot the police officer. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he shot him in the head. I was at that funeral.
It is a reminder that the crime of domestic violence isn't just about one victim; it is about an entire community.
As the widow walked down the aisle of the church, she had her two little boys with her, and she was holding this little girl in a dress that was covered in stars. The last time that family had been in that church was for the Nativity play that the boys had been in. The dad had been sitting proudly in the front row, and now they were at his funeral. That is what we are talking about with gun violence.
I join my colleagues on the floor to honor Americans whose lives were cruelly and unjustly taken from us by gun violence, and I am going to read some names of people who should never be forgotten.
In Alabama, Chase Green; in Arizona, Isaias Garcia Tovar, Sr., Isaias Tovar, Jr., and Delia Noriega; in Connecticut, Dwaneia Turner; in Delaware, Demier Chambers; in Florida, Earnest Lee ``Bug'' Riggs, Jr.; in Illinois, Brenda Poss-Barnes, Greg Barnes, Sr., and Daniel Kinney; in Indiana, Chanel Neal; in Kentucky, Kenya Renee Cunningham, Demontray Rhodes, and Katherine Bryan; in Missouri, Johnnie Jones; in Ohio, Alonzo Lewis; in Tennessee, Kevin Niyibizi; in Virginia, Eddie Jenkins; in Wisconsin, Kevin Kloth and Kevin Schneider.
Those are just 20 names out of the thousands of people lost to gun violence every year--an average of 100 gun violence deaths each day. That is three classrooms of children.
We also know the communities where mass shootings occur will never be the same. Atlanta, GA, and Boulder, CO, are now part of the ever growing list of cities and towns forever altered but never forgotten--
Midland, Odessa, Dayton, El Paso, Virginia Beach, Pittsburgh, Parkland, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, Newtown, to name a few--and I am greatly saddened that my home State of Minnesota also has communities on that list. On average, someone is killed with a gun every 21 hours in my State. That is 422 people each year.
Tonight, I am going to focus on the loss of two women from Minnesota, both of whom were healthcare workers and both of whom were moms. For the past year, frontline healthcare workers protected us from the pandemic, but for Lindsay Overbay and Bao Yang, we failed to protect them.
In February, Lindsay was killed in a horrible shooting at the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo, MN, where four of her coworkers were also injured. This just happened last month. She was a medical assistant at the clinic, and she devoted her life to healing others. She had a wonderful laugh that would make a room spark to life. Her husband said that her laugh was so distinctive that, if you walked into the clinic and you heard her laughing, you knew exactly who it was.
The spark of her own life was her family--her husband of 10 years and he beloved children, an 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl. Friends said that she lived and breathed her kids and that she cherished every moment spent with them. Her field of cardiology put her in contact with older patients whom she loved caring for because she said, ``They are at an age where they say what they are thinking.'' It is gut-wrenching and heartbreaking to think that Lindsay won't get to that age, won't get that happy freedom, won't get to see her two children grow up and graduate and have families of their own.
It has been reported that the shooter, whom some described as being a disgruntled patient, had previously made threats against the clinic.
Although we don't know whether this tragedy could have been prevented, in some way, we know it could have been. We should be doing more to encourage States to pass commonsense laws and to pass laws right here in this body that allow family members or law enforcement to get a court order to temporarily prevent a person from buying a gun who is in crisis.
By the way--and Senator Murphy knows this--after Parkland, I was in the White House when Donald Trump was President. I was seated across from him, and I was seated next to former Vice President Pence. I was there because of the domestic violence bill that I lead, and I still have the piece of paper on which I wrote the hashtags when Donald Trump said that he was for universal background checks not once, not twice, not three times, but multiple times. When we talked about this very issue--the idea of getting a court order to temporarily prevent a person who is in crisis from buying a gun, which is something that Vice President Pence supported because of what had happened in Indiana, and they had a similar law--President Trump said he was for it, that he was for this stuff.
Then what happened? We all know this. The next day or 2 days later, after this meeting that we had that was on TV, he met with the NRA, and he backed down. We can't keep backing down, and we know we now have a President in Joe Biden who will not back down.
Here is another story.
Just days ago, we lost another mother of two, Ms. Bao Yang of St. Paul, MN. She worked hard to raise her sons, ages 21 and 11, as a single mom. She held multiple jobs while she studied to be a nurse--
graduating and getting her license a few years ago.
According to her son, ``all she ever wanted was to raise my little brother in the best life she could give him. I could see how much stress she carried every day but still always managed to provide for'' us.
Bao's sister said she was a sweet, loving, caring, hard-working person who only wanted the best for everyone.
But a few days ago--right around the time as what happened in Atlanta; these stories are both completely fresh; they just happened--
on Saturday morning at 8:30, the police were called to her house, and they found that she had been shot. She died later that morning. According to her family, she was a victim of domestic violence, turned deadly because of a gun. Her killer was her former boyfriend.
Unfortunately, her story is far too common. According to the Department of Justice, nearly half of the women who are killed by intimate partners are killed by current or former dating partners.
Violence Free Minnesota, which is a statewide coalition of organizations that provides services to victims of domestic abuse, said of her homicide that she was the eighth Minnesotan to die due to domestic violence this year. There were 29 domestic violence-related deaths in Minnesota last year. Yet Federal law does not prohibit abusive dating partners or convicted stalkers from buying a gun, which is a problem I have been trying to fix since I got to Washington.
We had hearings on this bill. We had a hearing in the Judiciary Committee years ago where the Republican witnesses agreed that we should close what is called the ``boyfriend loophole.'' As one of the conservative sheriffs from Wisconsin testified, he said that, basically, mean boyfriends shoot just as hard and hit just as hard as mean husbands. Yet that discrepancy exists in a number of States.
And what just happened just a few weeks ago? The Violence Against Women Act passed in the House of Representatives, Senator Murphy. It passed in the House of Representatives with 29 Republican votes, and that provision is in there. That is now coming over to the U.S. Senate, and it has been one of the reasons this bill has been stalled out.
I do not know how after what we have seen with the numbers of domestic violence cases, after the story I just told of a woman we just lost this weekend, and how after what happened in Atlanta, we cannot acknowledge this violence against women and, in particular, against women of color. This is one thing that we can do right now. We literally can pass that bill as we work on background checks and all of the other things that we need to do.
I will end with this, Senator Murphy, that what happened in your State with the Sandy Hook shooting is forever etched in all of our minds and memories. When people ask, ``What was your best day in the Senate?'' I talk about a bill I passed--maybe little known to some--
involving a young girl who was killed as a result of a swimming pool tragedy. We fixed that rule about pools at least a few years ago, and no one has died since.
Then they ask about my saddest day. For me, it was when the bipartisan background check went down, because those parents whom Senator Murphy knows so well were in my office, and I was one of the several Senators who had to tell them ``no'' even though they had had the courage to come before the Senate. In particular, one woman told me that story of waiting in the firehouse, waiting as, one by one, the kids would come in, and, pretty soon, they knew that they would never see their little boy again.
And as she just broke down crying, remembering the last thing she had seen him do, which was point to the picture of the school aide on their refrigerator, and as she sat there, crumpled on the floor, crying, she thought of that aide and thought: She will never leave his side. And when they found them, shot in the school, that woman had her arms around that little boy, and they were both shot to death.
And we all had to look at those families and say: You had the courage to come forward to fight for a bill that wouldn't have even prevented the killing of children, but you knew it was the best thing to prevent violence around the country, and that was background checks, but the Senate did not have the courage to pass it. That time has come. The courage must be in all of us, and we must get this done.
Thank you, Senator Murphy.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise, as my colleagues have tonight, to talk about gun violence again. It seems that only a few months pass, and we are here over and over again, talking about this uniquely American problem.
Tonight, we gather in grief--a lot of sadness throughout the country, people offering, as I do tonight, once again, condolences to the families in both the State of Georgia, the State of Colorado, and so many others--so many other families throughout the country who have lost a loved one just in the last week or month or within the last year.
But we also, I think, tonight have to do more than just offer condolences and offer support for the families. We have to ask ourselves some basic questions, and one question that keeps coming back every time we gather--at least for me it does and, I know, probably for a lot of Americans--is not simply why are we not beginning to solve this problem, why aren't we taking action. They are obvious questions we all ask. But one question that keeps coming to me over and over again is a simple question about the U.S. Senate: Will the U.S. Senate, once again, as it has now we can say year after year--will the U.S. Senate surrender to gun violence?
That is a question I have been asking myself. I have certainly asked it on this floor. Will the Senate continue to surrender to gun violence? And, by extension, therefore, the country is not taking action when we don't take action. The only way that we can begin to solve this problem over time is to take action here in the Senate.
The House has acted over and over again, as we know, bill after bill. In a larger sense, we have to ask ourselves: Is it really true? Will it be true again that the most powerful Nation on Earth--really, the most powerful Nation in the history of the human race--will that Nation once again surrender to this problem because of inaction here?
I know this is true in every State in the Union, but I certainly know it is true in Pennsylvania: The people of my home State and the people of America expect us to act. They don't expect us to surrender once again to this problem. They expect us to take action to pass commonsense gun measures that will, at a minimum, reduce the likelihood that we will have more mass shootings like we have experienced just in the last week and over and over again over months and now years. And even--even now we are moving into decades of mass casualty events involving guns.
So they expect us to act, not to genuflect to the gun lobby. And tonight we have to ask that question again: Will the U.S. Senate surrender to this problem and, really, by implication, surrender and genuflect to the gun lobby?
Tonight, I know that my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Murphy, and others have read through some names of victims of gun violence, and I will add to that list. It is about 20. Just--just a fraction, a tiny fraction, of those we lost just in the last couple of years from so many different States:
Kortlin Williams from the State of Missouri; Marcus Obrian Young from the State of North Carolina; Marquez Warden from Virginia; Marvin Scott from Maryland; Melvin Porter from Georgia; Omar Mohamed Juma from Texas; Russell Jones, also from Texas; Saveon Th'Marcus Washington from the State of Alabama; Angela Thompson from Oklahoma; Stephanie Lee from Ohio; Tahjier Lafleur from California; Teon Burwell from Virginia; Xavier Cancer from South Carolina; Brenda Sue Strawser Sines, Maryland; Tera'Lynn Cantrell from Arkansas; Teshundra Fortune from Mississippi; Quindarious Ford from Georgia; Raemel Richardson from Louisiana; Sarah Larocca from Colorado; and, finally, Andre Odom from Ohio.
I am not sure it is possible for any one of us who hasn't been--whose family has not been a victim of gun violence to in any way not only understand but even to offer the appropriate words that we try to offer to these families on a night like this and on so many other days and nights.
I always turn back to the words of others about what this might mean to those families. I just can't even imagine what it would be like to lose a family member to gun violence or to any violence, for that matter.
Remember the words of the great recording artist Bruce Springsteen. He wrote a song in the aftermath--the horror of the aftermath of 9/11, and he was trying to capture in a series of songs that he wrote and put in an album at the time capturing the loss, the pain, the pain of the loss that so many American families felt at that time. And I always thought it was applicable, that kind of loss, to what these families feel when a member of their family is killed by gun violence.
Springsteen's refrain in that song--the name of the song is ``You're Missing,'' and he keeps using that refrain:
You're missing when I shut out the lights.
You're missing when I close my eyes.
You're missing when I see the sunrise.
That is the reality for these families. Every moment of their day will be a time when they will be missing that family member for God only knows how long.
So we are thinking of those families tonight who have loved and lost.
We are also remembering--and this is another area where we have not taken action--we are also remembering families that had a member of their family become a victim of gun violence, but they survived, but their life is changed unalterably. The life of that individual has changed. The life of his or her family changes and so many burdens they have to carry, having survived gun violence.
We know that 100 are killed each day--more than 40,000 across the country in our country. But we also know numbers about those who have survived: 230 people sustain a nonfatal gun injury every day, and it is estimated that about 10 million Americans have been shot and injured during their lifetime--10 million Americans.
We also know that gun violence injuries are more likely to occur in younger people. Each year, approximately 15,600 children and teenagers are shot and injured. Black children and teenagers are 14 times more likely than their White peers to die by gun homicide.
Those who survive--those huge numbers who survive--have their lives changed forever. The role that that victim plays in the family is made exponentially more different.
I will talk about one of those individuals tonight. His name is Azir Harris.
Azir Harris was 17 years old in February of 2018--February 15, to be exact. It was the day after the Parkland shooting in Florida. Azir was shot five times on his way to grab something to eat with two of his friends in South Philadelphia.
He was paralyzed from the waist down, caught in the crossfire of gun violence as an innocent bystander. Azir's life and his family's lives were turned upside down in seconds. Their house was just blocks away from where he almost lost his life--again, as I said, shot five times.
To navigate their two-story home, Azir's father would carry him up and down the stairs in their home. They searched desperately to relocate but were having trouble finding housing, which is often nearly impossible for victims of gun violence.
The family was eventually able to relocate into a home in North Philadelphia, but in the process, they were forced to leave behind some of their adult children in the old home they came from.
Azir continues to learn about how to navigate his new life in a wheelchair, and the family continues to struggle to find ways to improve his quality of life.
Now they are searching for housing outside of the city so they might be able to find a home with a backyard for Azir to enjoy.
Azir and his family will never be able to forget about this shooting--and he was shot five times--because they live with the consequences of that violence every single day. They are just one of millions who struggle financially, who struggle physically, who struggle emotionally because of the trauma of gun violence that has ravaged our communities, our schools, our churches, and our businesses.
So the U.S. Senate has an obligation on this part of the problem as well. We can't surrender to gun violence, and we can't surrender to the question of what we are going to do to help those who survive.
We certainly have to pass commonsense gun measures, as I mentioned before--something as simple and as overwhelmingly popular as universal background checks. And at the same time, we can pass a number of other commonsense measures, including a bill that I am leading here in the Senate and paired up with U.S. Representative Dwight Evans in the House, a great leader in our State from the city of Philadelphia. This bill is the Resources for Victims of Gun Violence, and Dwight Evans and I are working to get it passed.
The bill would create an interagency advisory council with experts from Federal Agencies, victims of gun violence, and victim assistance professionals. Among other things, this council would make it easier for victims of gun violence to access resources by assessing, gathering, and disseminating information about different benefits and programs that could assist the victims--the victims of gun violence, like Azir and his family.
But I come back to where I started as I conclude my remarks. We have to ask that question: Will the U.S. Senate once again surrender to gun violence, do nothing about the tragic loss of life that we have seen just in the last week, surrender to the carnage that we see not just this week and last week and month after month but now literally decade after decade?
There hasn't been on the floor of the U.S. Senate a significant, substantial debate on gun violence in I don't know how long; I guess since maybe 2013--8 years. There has been 8 years of virtually no debate and 8 years of not voting, not even passing a vote on these commonsense gun measures, because the gun lobby has created a blockade. So the Senate was not even permitted, I guess, under their rules--the rules of the gun lobby and the rules of the majority until recently--
prohibited from even debating, let alone voting on commonsense measures.
So while the victims of gun violence are burdened by all the changes in their lives and the expense and the trauma they live through, while others suffer through the consequence of losing a loved one and feeling that sense of missing someone every day, while all that is happening, the U.S. Senate has been frozen in place for 8 years at least. We haven't even voted on commonsense measures.
It is time for the Senate to act, not to genuflect to the gun lobby like so many in this Chamber seem to want to do year after year. It is time for the Senate to act, to pass commonsense gun reform at long last.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Casey for his very powerful remarks and all of my colleagues for coming to the floor tonight in this event that Senator Murphy and I are helping to lead.
Now I recognize Senator Van Hollen of Maryland, a great friend and colleague who knows a lot about this topic.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Blumenthal, Senator Murphy, and everybody who has been brought together by this tragedy that we witnessed in our country--first a few days ago in Atlanta and then Boulder.
The tragedy is that these are not isolated events; these are the kinds of tragedies we see all too often and, indeed, every day in neighborhoods and streets around our country. So it is important that we come together to talk about the horror of the daily toll of gun violence and also highlight the horror of the fact that this body and the Federal Government have not taken action to stop those daily horrors.
Mr. President, I want to begin by joining my colleagues in reading out loud the names of 20 of our fellow Americans who have perished from gun violence just this year, 15 from across the country and 5 from my home State of Maryland. This is just this year, and this is just a few of those who have been shot down through gun violence: Caleb Day of Ohio, age 19; Cody Nichols Campbell of Indiana, age 27; Alex Jackson of New Mexico, age 15; Gregory Dewayne Lynn Chandler of Texas, age 32; Debra Derrick of New Jersey, age 63; Jason B. West, of North Carolina, age 36; Jeremiah Lowery of Louisiana, age 17; Caleb Martin of South Carolina, age 18; Lavontae Sharron Johnson of Virginia, age 23; Holly Elizabeth Beard Montana of Alabama, March 11, 2021, age 51; Jessica Ruiz of Texas, age 20; Najeebat Sule of Pennsylvania, age 24; Ricardo M. Lopez of New York, age 37; Richard Douglas Sloane of Kentucky, age 33; and Tyree Riley of Indiana, age 18.
In Maryland, my State of Maryland, just this year: April Renee Lawson, age 18; Genesis Garrett, age 22; Terry Williams, age 18; Ken Gerstley, age 50; and Guy Thomas, age 52.
We read these names tonight and remember these lives because it is important to pay tribute to those whom we have lost, but it is also to make sure that tonight is not the end of their story and that we dedicate ourselves to turning words into action here in the Senate.
Our country is now experiencing an upswing in gun violence, the largest increase in gun violence since 1960. Between the years 2019 and 2020, we have seen that big jump, and it should horrify everyone and give us pause and cause us to reflect.
I have been texting back and forth in the last few days after the shootings in Atlanta and Boulder with a friend of mine whom I first met two decades ago. Her name is Carole Price. I met her under the most tragic of circumstances. Carole and her husband John lost their beloved 13-year-old son John to gun violence. Their beautiful 13-year-old boy John went next door to play at a neighbor's house. There was a loose gun, and it was an accidental shooting. John died. He was 13 years old.
Like so many other parents or loved ones of victims of shooting deaths, Carole had the courage to take her pain, take her tragedy and work to try to make sure that kind of pain and tragedy didn't happen to another family in the State of Maryland or in the country. She did what was within her power.
At the time, I was in the Maryland Legislature, and she came and implored the Maryland Legislature to do something--something to prevent this kind of horrible tragedy from being experienced by other Maryland families, and the legislature acted. Maryland became the first State in the country at that time to require that guns sold in our State have embedded trigger locks, safety locks, so that if they were left lying around, it would be less likely that some 13-year-old boy or girl would pick it up and shoot their friend. That bill saved lives in Maryland, and that is because of Carole Price.
Think of what is happening today in our country. The pandemic hit. What did we do? We worked to follow the advice of public health experts--social distance, wear masks--and we went into overdrive. We went into overdrive to develop a vaccine to stop the deaths. When it comes to the epidemic of gun violence, we see no such actions being taken here at the Federal level. The normal thing to do would be to do what the Maryland State Legislature did in response to that tragedy Carole Price went through--try to take some action to prevent other families from experiencing that tragedy.
When Carole texted me the other day, it was just another reminder that the pain of losing a loved one to gun violence never goes away. In fact, that pain comes back again and again when we see these mass shootings, and it comes back and again when Carole Price reads about another boy or girl or another person who died from gun violence in their home. Again, we see it on a daily basis.
The reason it is so important that we come together and focus on this is that there are some, I think, in our country who have lost the capacity to be surprised. I know we were all shocked and surprised after Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after the Pulse nightclub and the Mother Emanuel AME shootings, maybe the shooting in Las Vegas. We were shocked at some point in the past that people would indiscriminately take the lives of others. We were shocked at the daily toll of gun violence. Even if it was in a place like Baltimore or another city in Maryland and it didn't make the national news, it still was a shocking thing that somebody would just gun down a fellow human being. But now when we see it happen time and again, mass shootings and the daily toll, nobody can claim surprise. What is surprising is that, as a nation, we haven't summoned the will to do something about it the same way we have worked to summon the will to defeat the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2019, 757 Marylanders died from gun violence. In fact, it has become so routine that by this time tomorrow, on the current trajectory, 2 more--2 more Marylanders will have died from gun violence. That is 1 State out of our 50 States. This is something that tears at the fabric of communities in our country. It has had a disproportionate impact and pain on communities of color.
I want to tell my colleagues about Denise Reid, who knows what it is like to carry the burden and pain of losing loved ones to gun violence. Denise grew up in Baltimore. She lost her uncle to gun violence. She lost her cousin to gun violence. She lost her cousin's girlfriend to gun violence. Her mother was shot standing in the doorway of their Baltimore home. Thankfully, she survived. In October 2006, Denise's son Tavon was shot and gravely wounded, paralyzed from the neck down. He survived his injury for 3 years but passed away after that.
So tonight, I ask all of us to pay tribute to Denise and to her son Tavon Terrell Water, Sr., who was gone too soon, but I want to tell you about Denise because she is an inspiration to us all. She still lives in Baltimore. She works as the chaplain with the Baltimore City Police, working every day to serve her community and give back to the city she loves but wants to make better and safer.
My State of Maryland has thankfully joined Denise and Carole Price and all those who have lost someone to gun violence by passing commonsense measures in our State of Maryland. But the State of Maryland, like every other State, is not an island. We can't do it alone. We need for the Congress to take action.
If you look at guns that were used in Maryland in crimes, 54 percent of them come from outside of the State of Maryland, from States that do not have those kinds of commonsense gun laws that make people safe.
So, Maryland, like so many other States, is calling upon our brothers and sisters from across the Union to help us take action, and we know that the public believes and understands that too. Some of my colleagues have said 90 percent of the American public supports basic background checks for people purchasing guns.
I want to tell my colleagues about Michael Derrick Baughan, who was born March 18, 1983, excelled in school throughout his life. He went to college in Maryland, and then he moved to Delaware. His mother Cheryl remembers picking up the phone one day and hearing her son at other end of the line saying: Mom, I went to Walmart and got a gun in 15 minutes. I can't get a driver's license that fast, but I got a gun because I am feeling pain, and I have a gun to my head.
Cheryl and Michael spoke on the phone for 2 hours before Michael agreed to take the bullets out of his gun. But that wasn't the last time he made an attempt, and Michael died of suicide, gunshot, February 2014.
Whether it is the ease of getting a gun to commit suicide or the ease of getting a gun to shoot down others, what we have in the country today is simply unacceptable. As Daniel Webster, who is a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University of Maryland, said: Gun violence is not inevitable. It is very preventable.
We know that. We know there are things we can do to prevent gun violence. I am not going to go into a litany of legislation that we could pass to make things better. I do want to point out, though, that we have an organization, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives--the ATF, as it is commonly referred to--whose job it is, who is charged with protecting the public from the illegal use of trafficking of firearms. And yet, while we give them that charge, we give them that responsibility, the House and the Senate, over the years, have tied their hands. We have handcuffed them. We made it very difficult for them to do their job. We prevent them from sharing trace crime gun data on firearms with the public and on people doing research into the gun violence epidemic. We bar the ATF from legally requiring gun dealers to keep accurate inventories of their guns and report lost or stolen firearms. Simple things like that that we say they can't do.
I want to end by talking about an initiative of the mayor of Baltimore City, Mayor Brandon Scott, who has worked with Everytown, the organization, to create a cutting-edge internal system to help law enforcement track and understand and disrupt the stream of firearms entering the city of Baltimore. They have worked hard to try to overcome these obstacles that we put in the way of ATF. But that is a challenge, and it shouldn't be so hard.
We had a program in the city of Baltimore--still do. It is called Safe Streets. It is headed by a person called Dante Barksdale. He went by the name of ``Tater.'' He was known throughout Baltimore as the smiling face of Safe Streets, which was a gun violence prevention program.
Dante was committed to the mission. He helped others learn to put down their guns. Dante was shot to death on January 17 of this year. In that moment, Maryland lost a son, a mentor, a hero, and as Mayor Scott called him, a man who saved thousands of lives in our city, thousands of lives, and yet his was taken by gun violence--gun violence that is preventable.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New Jersey
Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, Member after Member has come down tonight to speak, and the conversation, as we all have come down here, was to come do something that I think is extraordinarily poignant.
This is the floor where policy is debated and where ideas of governance are discussed. It is a deliberative body, but we are in a democracy, and we represent people. So, tonight, the idea was that we would come down here and talk about people, but the pain is that they are not alive; that we would discuss the deceased, the dead, the murdered, the killed.
I believe that if America has not broken your heart, then you don't love her enough. Name after name tonight has been spoken by colleague after colleague, and, dear God, every single name is a son or daughter. It is a brother or sister. It is a family member. They are a person, part of a community, and they are dead.
But this is not just any limited list. It seems to grow like a cancer on the soul of our country. You take my age, 51 years old. Well, in just the time of my life, the death in our country has been something like has never before been seen in even a country at war because the people who have died, the human beings who have been lost, the family members who have been slain, their total number, in just my lifetime, add up to more than all of the Americans who have died in every single war from the Revolution to our current wars in the Middle East.
So my friends and my colleagues have read name after name after name, but the painful, heartbreaking reality is we could have taken hour after hour over days after days to name the total who have died in my lifetime. And the heartbreaking stories have to stagger you when you hear the testimony. On March 1, Kaiden Alex Peak, who was 4 years old, and his brother, Mayson Paul Peak, who was 3 years old, were gunned down, killed in Warsaw, MO. Jennifer Garcia, 21 years of age, and Charlie Borbon Lopez, 20 years, both killed in Portland, OR. Say their names. Say their names. Say their names.
Cobe Hilliard, 19, killed in Temple, TX. April Williams, 21, and her mom Tammy Briggs, 46, killed in Augusta, GA. Say their names. Say their names.
Christine Ruffin, age 61, was killed with a gun in Palm City, FL. Delquan Daniels, 23 years old, was killed with a gun in Rochester, NY. Say their names. Say their names.
Gerson Aleman Velasquez, 19, was killed with a gun in Myrtle Beach, SC. Lionel Darling, age 39, and Rayneesha Dotson, age 30, were both killed with guns--killed with guns. Say their name. Say their name.
Maritza Remijio Paniagua, age 20, was killed with a gun in Los Angeles. Merlyn McCallister, age 51, was killed with a gun in Chicago. Mishealia Marie Meredith, age 19, was killed with a gun in Eldorado, IL. Victor Brooks, age 20, was killed with a gun in Phoenix, AZ. Ronald Jeffery Laroy Jones, Jr., age 25, was killed with a gun in Columbus, OH. Say their names. Say their names.
This is the question of our country. What is the quality of our mercy? How courageous is our empathy? How destitute is our compassion? How anemic is our love for one another that this many Americans are dying hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year? Carnage in our country like never before seen in humanity, and we do nothing as a society and a government that was formed for a more perfect Union, for domestic tranquility, and for justice. At the top of our Federal Government's Constitution is the very ideal that we are for the common defense. Say their names.
Do we honor them? Do we love their survivors? Love is not sentimentality. It is not words. It demands something. It necessitates sacrifice. And I can tell you I am one of those folks who, serving in an American city, would have my police officers show me the films of murders from our cameras--human beings being shot and killed. How could it not shake the core of your soul? How could it not rip open wounds that cannot be healed?
My colleagues reading names of people, children lost, kids lost to suicide, bodies mangled, people paralyzed, how could it not call to your conscience? How could it not demand from all of us not to sit idly by and watch and witness? We are wounded as a society. We are hurting. There is pain that is unspoken, and that is so dangerous.
In 2018, Shahad Smith, I knew him well. I used to live in high-rise projects at the top of my block. There was a group of boys there, led by this young man named Hassan Washington. Hassan was brilliant. He was funny. He had a sharp wit. He had charisma. Shahad was one of the young men in high school who hung out with him in the lobby of my building. I would come home and I would see them there.
And I tell you, in 2018, I make it to the U.S. Senate, and I get a call from Jimmy Wright, a police officer from those buildings who--he is a beautiful man, and he was shaken. They killed Shahad on my block, where I live as a U.S. Senator, at the top of my block, and I will never forget how Jimmy described it. He said: Cory, I talked to the police officer. He was killed with an assault rifle. And he said: Cory, the police officer told me his head exploded.
And I--I had to hold onto something because most of those kids from that lobby, the children I watched grow up in my 8 years living in those projects, in those buildings, Black boys in a world where there is so much assault--the first of them to die.
In 2005, I would come home at night. I was chasing my dream to be the mayor of the largest city in my State. I was getting ready to run for office, and I came home and I smelled marijuana in the lobby.
Now, we live in a country where it is a lot different watching kids at Stanford, Yale smoke pot and have no worries. But for inner city Black kids, I will tell you right now, they have no margins for experimentation. And I said to myself: Oh, I have to intervene here. So I started asking them: Let's get out of this lobby. Let's go do something. Let's go to the movies. Let's eat. And I will never forget. I made a mistake, y'all. I said: You guys choose a movie. That was a mistake because they took me to something called ``Saw II.'' Do not see that movie.
And we went out to dinner at a diner, Andrew's Diner. I remember the conversations with them. I asked them what their dreams were. And this moved me because their dreams, they were humble dreams.
And I said that I would connect them with mentors, and I had all these plans about how to help these young men get out of the danger zone. Then I got too busy with my campaign. And I remember feeling a little guilty that I was too busy to follow through on the commitments I had made. And I consoled myself that I was running for mayor: When I become mayor, God, I will be able to help all children in the city. I will step up then. Let me just get through the campaign.
Well, I would still come home at night, and the boys weren't mad at me or anything like that. They would still greet me and cheer me on when I came into the lobby, Shahad and Hassan. It was amazing. They would lift me up.
One day they had lawn signs, my lawn signs, waving them, and formed a parade line. And I walked out and waved and got in the elevator until I realized, where did they get those lawn signs from? They are kind of expensive.
I ended up winning. And I had death threats on me. And when you are elected to office, get death threats, you have security. And next thing you know, I had police officers stationed in the lobby, and the boys weren't there anymore. They didn't want to hang out where the police officers were.
And I didn't think too much about it because I was running at full speed as a new mayor. I was 36, 37 years old. The violent crime in our city was peaking. There were too many shooters in that hot summer. I will never forget. And I would run to every street corner I could where there was a shooting in our city. And I would stand there, and I would say: This is not who we are. This is not America. This is not Newark. We are going to overcome this. And I would give street-level sermons telling people about the vision for our city. And, God, we would eventually turn down the violence.
But in those early days, a month into my office, I show up on a street corner, and there is a body covered by a sheet and another one being loaded on the back of an ambulance. And I barely paid attention to the humanity on the street. I didn't even ask for the names. I was too busy ministering to the living.
I get home that night to steal a couple hours of sleep in my early days as mayor. And I will never forget sitting in my bedroom with my BlackBerry, going through it, and I saw the name on the homicide report. At that moment in my life, something broke in me that will never fix. It wasn't an anonymous name that I didn't know. It wasn't just a cold issuance of another crime in a big city. The name was Hassan Washington. Four floors below me he lived with his grandma, a kid I promised to help with his dreams.
I will never forget his funeral for as long as I live. Perry's Funeral Home--God bless them, those professionals. I entered that funeral home as the newly minted mayor. And I was so upset when I saw it was in their basement room because going in that room was like descending into the bowel of a ship, a narrow staircase. And I get into this room. We were piled in on top of each other like we were chained together in grief, and people were crying. Everybody was showing up. Everybody was there for what is an American tradition: almost every day, another boy, another Black boy in a box killed by a gun.
And I wish I could tell you that I was strong in that moment. I wish I could tell you that I was mayoral, that I was a leader and the father of a city, but I wasn't. I felt shame. I felt hurt. I felt embarrassment.
I tried to lean on other people in that room. There were folk I had known for years, but, finally, I had enough. I had to run. I left there. I jumped in my SUV, drove to my new office in City Hall. And for the first time--not the last but for the first time as the mayor of New Jersey's great and largest city, I sat in that office, and I wept over a dead boy. And all I could think about was climbing through the feelings of shame and hurt and pain. All I could think about was that funeral in that basement room, packed full of people. All of us were there for his death, but where were we for his life?
What a morbid thing we have been doing here tonight, reading the names of dead people killed in our country, hoping that somehow--
somehow we could change. Well, I will tell you this right now: We are in a distraught moment in our Nation, where most of us agree on solid steps. It won't solve all the problems, but it would make a difference. It would save a Hassan. It would save a Shahad. It would save the 3- and 4-year-olds, the names I have read.
The question is, How courageous are we? How much do we truly love one another? What will we do? This is a moment in American history that could be the inflection point. If we act now, we could end some of this nightmare. If we fail to do anything, we will be back here again. The list of the dead will be longer. The heartache and the pain and the wounds and the grief and the sorrow and the shame will be deeper in America, the world's greatest country.
We must demand of each other a greater love. We must end the poverty of empathy. We must free ourselves from this prison, from this dungeon. We must release ourselves from these chains. We must demand that this Nation be the Nation we want it to be, be the Nation we hope it should be, be the Nation that those in military uniform died for--a nation where we make real the greatest principles of humanity, the greatest calling of every faith that there is--not words, but real, true, manifestation of the principle and the call.
Will we be silent? Will we be ignorant? Will we avoid? Will we do nothing? Will we be passive? Or will we truly be a nation that loves one another?
I yield the floor
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Marcia Reitman Currie from New York; Mitchell Wright, Jr., from Missouri; Nicholas Tarpley from Pennsylvania; Reuben Lewis III from California; Rhyce Wingate-Bey, Maryland; Robert Crochiere, Massachusetts; Samuel Lamont Smith-
Williams, Tennessee; Spencer Wilcox, Oregon; Anthony Castillo, New York--we didn't come close to finishing this list tonight. We didn't make a dent in the list of those names of the people who have died from gun violence in 2021 alone, a year in which almost 10,000 people have died in less than 3 months in suicides and homicides and accidental shootings.
It is a choice. None of this is inevitable. Almost all of it is preventable. It only happens here in the United States of America because other countries make different choices.
Congress goes the next 2 weeks on a district work period. We wanted to come to the floor tonight to make clear that we are not going to forget those who have died through the inaction of this body, their national leaders; that we are going to renew our commitment to be better and to change and to begin that process in the wake of the shootings in Boulder and Atlanta by making sure that everybody hears the names of those who have died.
I yield to Senator Blumenthal to wrap up for the evening.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, there is no last word tonight. There is no final saying here. There are no final names. Nora Beller, Tito Roman, Aaliyah Eubanks, Dominick Boston, Brad Keel, James Ray Huddelston--we could be here a long time. But the tragedy is there will be more names, 100 more, at this time tomorrow night.
And every one of these names is a future cut short. Every one of them is a life that could have given so much, bringing more light and joy, pride, grace, dignity.
My colleagues have come to the floor with great eloquence. I want to thank them. But the most eloquent part tonight is the names. And we should take inspiration from the courage of their families, the strength of the survivors, advocates, and activists who are forming a political movement that is creating ripples turning into waves that will overcome. They will overcome the intransigence and cowardice of colleagues who fail to heed the American public, and they will be held accountable.
Thank you.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered
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