Gun Violence
Floor Speech
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Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, and I thank him so much for doing this Special Order.
I want to begin, first of all, by thanking my colleague on the other side of the Capitol, Senator Tim Scott, for a tremendous speech he gave on the floor of the Senate last evening. I thank him so much for sharing with the American people an issue that has, for some reason, converged with our overall discussions of gun violence.
Now, tonight, at around 7:30, we are going to have a national SpeakOut here on the west lawn of the Capitol. We will be speaking out on this whole issue of gun violence. I am particularly interested in one part of our effort dealing with background checks.
Now, some have said that background checks legislation that we are proposing would not have had any impact on most of these issues, if not all. Well, I beg to differ when it comes to Charleston and the Emanuel 9.
The facts are very clear that the gentleman who purchased the gun that he used to murder those nine souls doing their Bible study at Emanuel AME Church June 17 of last year was not eligible by law to have purchased a gun because of a 72-hour rule that we have in our background check laws. If you apply to purchase a gun and the background check is undertaken and it is not completed in 3 days, you can go back and get the gun, irrespective of whether or not you are eligible to have it.
Now, thanks to the Government Accountability Office, 2 days ago, they issued a study, and the study covered a period of 10 years, from 2006 to 2015. Here is what they have revealed. During that 10-year period, 89,000 requests to purchase a gun were denied because of domestic abuse; however, 6,700 were purchased by people who were ineligible because of that 3-day rule.
Now, over 90 percent of the people who apply to purchase a weapon have their background checks completed within 2 days, but there is that 10 percent that require additional scrutiny. We don't know whether or not people intentionally give the wrong information. If someone really wanted to curtail the law and knows what the law is, that person could very well give the wrong address, give the wrong middle initial, do something to cause the background check to be extended beyond the 3-day period.
The gentleman who purchased the gun in the case of the Emanuel 9, it was an interesting confluence of mistakes. It had nothing to do with the bureaucracy. For some strange reason, when he was arrested for his problem, rather than taking him to the Columbia jail, they took him to the West Columbia jail. So, when they looked for his record, they looked for the record in Columbia. But for some strange reason, the record was across the river in West Columbia. By the time they detected what the problem was, the 3 days had expired and he was able to purchase a gun.
Within days of that purchase, he went online and he studied the history of Emanuel AME Church, the church where Denmark Vesey organized an insurrection in 1822 in the basement of Emanuel Church. He looked at that history. He saw Emanuel AME Church as one of the most historical African American churches not just in the State of South Carolina, but in the country, and he targeted that church.
He went there, invited himself into the Bible study with these blessed souls, and sat with them for an hour. Then he got up, took out the gun that he had bought, which he was not eligible to purchase, and began to murder them systematically. One woman, Ms. Sanders, is here in Washington and will be here with us this evening, lost her son, her aunt, and a cousin. The reason she is still with us today is because she played dead under a table while covering up her little grandchildren. She watched her son walk up to the shooter and say: Why are you doing this? We mean you no harm.
But he said: I have got to do it.
Why?
Because I want to start a race war.
Well, he did not start a race war. This whole country saw what forgiveness was all about. Within 48 hours, these family members, these survivors, were in a judicial courtroom. They looked at the perpetrator, and one after the other looked at him and said: I forgive you.
Well, I am appreciative of my constituents for forgiving, but I believe, as their representative here in this body, it is incumbent upon me to do whatever I can--and, hopefully, we will be joined by others in this body--to close this loophole. Let's make sure that gun purchases are not made until the background check is completed. If it takes 4 days or 5 days, what is that all about? What we must do is make sure that demented criminals and domestic abusers are not allowed to purchase guns because we know from history that they mean no good when they do.
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