On the recordJuly 20, 2022
I am honored to stand here with my friends--Chairman Perry, Mr. Cawthorn, Mr. Good, Mr. Norman--in defense of our Second Amendment rights. I say this not only as a Member of Congress, but I say this as a woman, and I say this as a mother. I say this also as an adult who knows what it is like when my school was held hostage by another student with a gun, a very upset student. It is not the guns that are the issue. It is the severe mental illness, the breakdown in America with our morals and our values, and this severe divide among all of us as Americans. I want to add to this, and this is a story that I haven't even been able to share with my good colleagues here, but just this weekend, now that I am a Member of Congress, many of us get a lot of death threats, but one of my family members received a voicemail on their personal cell phone from a man saying very bad things about me, and then saying: ``This is what I am going to do to her,'' and he cocked a gun and shot it several times. This is the type of threats I get, and it came with the threat of a gun. But I tell you this as a woman and a gun owner: I need to be able to have any kind of gun that I want to own to defend myself, to defend my family, to defend my home. God forbid if someone chose to do something to me. You see, here is the issue: It doesn't matter how many gun control laws we put in place. It doesn't matter how many types of guns are banned.…
