Political Quotes

“Mr. President, for 20 years one of the biggest billboards in America was next to Fenway Park, facing the Massachusetts Turnpike. It had a giant number counter on it. When I was running for the Senate in 2012, I would drive past that billboard sometimes three or four times a day. Each time, I would look up at the counter to see how it had changed since the last trip--up 2, up 6, up 12. The billboard was from Stop Handgun Violence, and it showed the number of children killed by guns in the United States. When the tragedy happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, my first thought was of the 20 little children who would be added to the count on that billboard. I thought about how we, the grownups, had failed to keep safe the thousands of children counted there. There are mass shootings, everyday shootings, drive-by shootings, random shootings, sometimes with big headlines and mostly with no headlines at all. The facts are simple: Eighty-eight Americans die every day from gun violence. Seven of those people are children or teens. That is seven a day, every day, young bodies piling up by the thousands year after year. What has happened to us? If seven children were dying every day from a mysterious virus, our country would pull out all the stops to figure out what had gone wrong and to fix it. Gun violence is an epidemic--an epidemic that kills children, kills them in schools, on playgrounds, and in our neighborhoods.…”