Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to come to the floor today to talk about a success story but, potentially, a success story interrupted. Back in 2022, we all were shocked to watch news playing out during an afternoon that we were here, working in the Senate, of another mass shooting--this one of just unthinkable size and scope--in Uvalde, TX. I was actually sitting in the Presiding Officer's chair when I saw word of the shooting scroll across my smartphone screen. Gratefully, in the wake of that shooting, a group of us--Republicans and Democrats--were able to come together and set aside the differences that we had and still have on the issue of gun violence in this country. We decided not to argue about an assault weapons ban, for instance. Instead, we decided to work on finding the least common denominator, as we called it, and tried to find a set of commonsense changes to our gun laws and commonsense investments in our communities that would, hopefully, together, try to put a downward pressure on what, up until then, had been annual spiking rates of homicides and mass shootings. It is just true that, in this country, you are 10 times more likely to be shot in your school, in your neighborhood, at a movie theater than you are in any other high-income, developed nation. That is a choice. That is not bad luck. That is not happenstance. That is because, in America, we decide to have a ton of weapons in the hands of very dangerous people.…”