Slaughtered Innocents

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, sometime today or tomorrow, this House will hold a moment of silence for 50 massacred Floridians who had their bodies torn apart by a madman with a military-grade weapon.

Silence--that is how the leadership of the most powerful country in the world will respond to this week's massacre of its citizens.

If this Congress had a single moral fiber, we would force ourselves to get to know the slaughtered innocents. We would get to know Cory James Connell, 21 years old and a student at Valencia College, a child with dreams cut short by a madman with a military rifle and--make no mistake--cut short by this Congress' fetish to repeatedly meet bloody tragedy with silence.

Silence--that is what we offer in America that supports many of the things we could do to slow the bloodbath.

Silence.

Not me. Not anymore. I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity, and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed.

Sooner or later, the country will hold us accountable for inaction. But as you bow your head and think of what you say to your God, when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocence, there will be silence.

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