Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I wish I could end this exchange on a hopeful note. I have come here so many times wishing that an exchange like this one could lead to progress. And we have offered again and again and again--the Senator from Connecticut on background checks, myself on red flag or emergency risk orders, on Ethan's Law with safe storage, on a myriad of proposals--to sit down with our colleagues and engage in the kind of constructive and positive dialogue that Senator Grassley has suggested, and they have yielded nothing. And the reason they have yielded nothing is essentially that, unfortunately, our Republican colleagues remain in the grip of a lobby--the gun lobby-- which is waning in its impact across the country but still maintains its grip in this Chamber.

That is the grip we need to break. That is the grip that will be broken through the democratic process if the American people have their way. And the American people are changing in their view.

In fact, there is now a political movement. It is composed of the young people--March for Our Lives--who suffered in Parkland, FL, when they saw the same kind of shooting and suffered the same kind of trauma that those students did in Oakland County, MI.

And again and again and again, this tragedy has been repeated in schools across our country. We are here again with grief and sorrow for the lives taken by gun violence--needlessly and violently.

Four young people--Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Justin Shilling, 17; Hana St. Juliana, 14; Tate Myre, 16--were shot multiple times, as my colleague from Connecticut has described it in that video, among many others trying to escape.

Six other students and a teacher were injured, and their community is reeling from this horror--a horror of blood and flesh and lives cut short forever.

And their loved ones have joined a club, as it has been called--a club nobody wants to join. Nobody wants to be admitted.

In just 12 days, just 12 days from now, it will be the ninth anniversary of a tragedy whose survivors joined that club--the families of the Sandy Hook children--20 beautiful, innocent children and 6 dedicated, courageous educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

And whenever I talk about this subject in this Chamber, I see them in the Gallery. I see them in the Gallery on the day that we failed. We failed by just a handful of votes to reach the 60 that we needed to pass a background check proposal. And one of them shouted ``shame.'' ``Shame.'' And it was shameful and disgraceful that we failed to act on that day.

Think of how many lives we could have saved. You know, in this body, we talk endlessly, and sometimes we act in a way that can affect real lives and real people. We could have saved real lives and real people on that day--not all the lives lost to gun violence, the tens of thousands who have perished since then, but some of them.

``When you save one life, you save the world'' is an adage in my faith. We had it within our grasp to save lives and to help save the world, but we failed then, and, again today, we failed, even with the impetus of that horror in our minds and before us played again and again.

And, for me, the voices of those survivors resonate. Their faces are forever with me, as they will be for all who knew the survivors of the Oakland, MI, tragedy.

They have become friends. They have become almost members of my family, and they relive their own tragedy when they see what happened in these shootings.

And the trauma affects not just the children in that school on Tuesday; it affects children everywhere.

Somebody said to me the other day: Do you know the three best words in the English language these days? ``Back to normal.''

We want to go back to normal. After a year and a half of the pandemic, we want to go back to normal, put kids back in school, put teachers back in the classroom--back to normal.

We are back to normal in gun violence. In fact, we are worse than normal. We are back to normal with school shootings because kids are back in school, but the rate of gun violence has, if anything, explosively increased. This normal cannot be normalized. It cannot be made the new normal. The finality of evil cannot be taken for granted.

The shame that that vote, 9 years ago, brought to this body is a stain that will forever haunt us and haunts us evermore when we fail, as we did today, to provide real action. And there isn't any panacea. My colleague from Connecticut is absolutely right. No single proposal is a solution.

And there are others that we have advanced and tried to make it a matter of bipartisan support. Senator Graham and I have worked on a red flag or emergency risk protection order statute that separates people from guns when they are dangerous to themselves or others, separates them when they are under a protective order and they buy those guns, or when a family member knows they are about to commit or take their own lives, not to mention other people's lives. More than half of all the gun deaths in this country are suicides. We can save those lives.

A large number of these deaths occur when children are playing with guns in their own homes because the guns have been unsafely stored. Ethan Song was killed in Connecticut because a parent failed to safely store a gun. Ethan's Law, requiring safe storage, would save lives.

Holding manufacturers accountable and depriving them of sweetheart deals that led to PLCAA--giving them immunity from any legal accountability--reversing that immunity would help to save lives in repealing PLCAA. There is more than one proposal that we need to seriously consider if we are going to have the kind of dialogue that my colleague Senator Grassley suggested.

But the simple fact is, the House of Representatives did its job back in March when it passed that bipartisan legislation to expand background checks.

We are trying to do our job today, seeking unanimous consent from our colleagues to move forward on H.R. 8, and there is no rational explanation-- none--when the vast majority of American people, gun owners as well as NRA members, all backgrounds, all walks of life, all geographic areas, all demographic areas, support this measure.

So back to normal--we are back to normal. We cannot tolerate this normal. And as we approach that ninth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting--and I recall that bleak day in December when we gathered at a firehouse with parents who were waiting to find out--waiting to know whether their children were still alive.

No matter what the ages of our children--I have four--we can relive that moment in our own minds, in our own hearts, and we can see in this Gallery those parents who came to speak truth to us, speak truth to power, and who will call us to account. The American people should call us to account for our failure to act today, our complicity in those deaths. This Congress is complicit. The Members who vote against these measures are complicit in the tragedies that follow.

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