Political Quotes

“I say to Senator Booker, there is nobody better than you in making people understand the human consequences of inaction and the potential for human benefit of action, so I am not going to try to compete. Let me give the statistics. Let me tell my colleagues what happens in States that impose rigorous systems of background checks. There are 64 percent fewer guns trafficked out of State, there are 48 percent fewer firearm suicides, there are 48 percent fewer police killed by handguns, there are 46 percent fewer women who are shot to death by intimate partners, and there are 17 percent fewer aggravated assaults with guns. Those numbers could be even better if there was a national commitment to the same concept because, as Senator Durbin has told us, as tough as Illinois' laws are, all it takes is for a criminal to go across the border into Indiana and buy guns at a gun show or buy them online or get them from an unregulated dealer and bring them back into Chicago. And what every police chief will tell you is that the fewer illegal guns on the street, the fewer crimes there are. The harder you make it for an individual at a moment of passion or a moment of frustration or whatever that moment may be to get a gun, the less likely you are to have a homicide. Senator Blumenthal and I went to a meeting of activists on this issue in Hartford, CT, a few weeks after the Newtown shooting, and they were furious.…”