Political Quotes

“I want to be clear about the purpose of the bill. It is not to collect more information on prospective gun buyers. It is to know the information we have, what has been collected, what can we infer from those things. For instance, on the form, we already collect race and ethnicity. The purpose of this bill is not to tell us individual details about the people who purchase the guns. We want to know these numbers in the aggregate so that nobody's particular traits or names will be disclosed as gun owners. We just need to know what it looks like statistically. There has been a question from some of my conservative colleagues as to why the bill asks for both gender and sex. The reason for that is, before 2016, the form 4473 used to ask what your gender was. After 2016, it asks what your sex is. The language of the law doesn't suggest that those two things are different things. It just acknowledges that the data that has been collected over the years has been collected under two different terms, and we want to know all the data. Mr. Speaker, banks also do background checks on prospective tellers and employees of the banks. Imagine if a bank had an error in their system that caused Black tellers or Hispanic tellers to fail the background check more than White tellers or other bank employees. The bank would be sued out of existence. Yet, we have a government system that we believe probably does this, so that is why we need to know the data.”