Political Quotes

“I would like to thank Senator Warnock and others for coming to the floor today to raise this truly existential crisis, put it in front of our colleagues. I have lost count of the number of times I have come down to the floor of the Senate to talk about this immoral anomaly in which you are subject to the risk of death by gunshot wound in the United States at a rate 10 times higher than any other high-income nation. I wish there were a truly complicated set of factors that play into the reason why we have so much more gun violence here than in other nations, but it probably isn't that complicated. We don't have more mental illness in this country. We don't spend less money on law enforcement. We don't have angrier people. We just have a lot more guns, and we are much more permissive in this country about allowing felons, dangerous people, and the mentally ill to get their hands on guns, and we are much more permissive around the question of which kinds of guns get in the hands of private citizens, especially guns that are designed to kill as many human beings as quickly as possible. As you can imagine, because I have a pretty high profile on this issue, when I am back in my State, I get confronted a lot by supporters of the Second Amendment, NRA members, who want to have a conversation with me about why I believe what I believe. That conversation normally starts with the assumption that I want to take guns away or ammunition away from law-abiding gun owners.…”