Political Quotes

“I would like to drill down a little bit on the remarks of my good friend and colleague, Mr. Thompson, about why these two bills, why the no fly, no buy bill, and the expanded background checks, are so important and why they are so critical for this House to take votes on them this week; because keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people--and let's remember who these people are: convicted felons, domestic violence abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill, and the no fly, no buy would add would-be terrorists to that list--I think is something the overwhelming number of Americans and, frankly, people living anywhere in the world would agree would make sense. Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people not only makes sense, but it works. Since background checks were instituted, over 2 million purchases of guns were stopped by would-be buyers who submitted to a background check and it came back with a rejection saying, You are not authorized; and the gun was not sold. So it does work. It doesn't work perfectly, but it works. And why does it matter that we expand background checks? Well, let me tell you a little bit of something that I learned when I was elected to this job and the horrible murders happened in Newtown. I learned about the details of our present system. When the background check system was put in 20 years ago, nobody bought guns on the Internet. In fact, most of us didn't buy much of anything on the Internet, but now we do.…”