Political Quotes

“I thank my friend Senator Cortez Masto for that powerful testimony, for sharing some of these stories talking about the impact on families in Las Vegas and throughout her State, and to talk about what this means from a parent's perspective, to think that her own family had to wonder whether their loved one was going to come back from that shooting that dominated the news, to think about how many lives were changed. Senator Blumenthal made a really important observation earlier and that was that the numbers we are using here, 39,000 people dying a year, and the names that we are reading into the Record, these are the names of the individuals who have died, but what we know is there are hundreds of thousands of others who have survived gunshot wounds. The trauma is different, but it is still serious and acute. When a loved one is shot, obviously, that comes with a moral disruption to the family that is hard to calculate. Often that injury has lifelong consequences. The individual is bound to a wheelchair, losing the use of legs and arms. These are serious consequences that affect the rest of your life. While today we are reading into the Record the names of those who have died, this stack represents, I think, just a fraction of those who have died in 2021. It could be four times as high if we had talked about those who have been injured in episodes of gun violence. Other colleagues are going to join us here tonight on the floor.…”