Mazie Hirono: “I want to thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee for his remarks just now. I, too, sit on the Judiciary…”

“I want to thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee for his remarks just now. I, too, sit on the Judiciary Committee, and I listened to Garnell Whitfield talk about his 86-year-old mother, who was murdered, and his charge to us to do something, because basically he said: If you are not going to do something in the face of all this gun carnage in our country, what are you doing here? I think that is a question that each of us should ask: What the heck are we doing here if not to protect America's citizens? One of the questions that I asked of the panel, which consisted of two invitees from the Republican side and three panel members of Democratic invitees--I asked them: Is the easy access to guns in our country a major part of the gun violence and the massacres and the killings in our country? And they each said yes. They acknowledged that the easy access to guns, regardless of ideology, is what makes our country the outlier country among all developed nations. What that says to me is that we need to be very, very committed and very serious about the need to enact sensible gun safety legislation. As I listened to one of my other colleagues a little bit earlier talking about inflation, yes, inflation is a problem, but certainly it is not the answer to just blame the Democrats. I would like my Republican colleagues to make a commitment to do what we need to do and at least get a start in ending the gun violence in our country.…”