Walter Tucker: “I rise in support of the rule and in support of the bill and hope that it will meet final passage. We have here a lot of…”

“I rise in support of the rule and in support of the bill and hope that it will meet final passage. We have here a lot of rhetoric today from the other side about the fact that we want to be concerned about the criminals and if in fact we are serious about crime, that we should be concerned about the criminals. Just a couple of weeks ago, when we had a crime bill here on the floor of the House, the same people who are giving us that rhetoric today were very hesitant about providing prevention money. They think that the answer to the concerns for the criminal is just to build more prisons. Mind you, if we have more crime and more criminals, we have to have more prisons. But if we are really concerned about the crime in this country, certainly we should be trying to treat crime futuristically and prospectively and providing more prevention money so that we can get to the root cause of crime instead of just housing more criminals in prisons, which are a festering hole for crime, so that when they get back out on the streets they are just more hardened than they were when they got in. What this bill is really about is not the criminals, whether criminals are going to have access to AK-47's in a black market. What it is really about is those people who want the right to bear arms.”