Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Ohio for yielding time. You know, a few years ago in this building, the U.S. Capitol, we had an active shooter. I was there. Tragically, he killed two brave Capitol Police officers as the shooter tried to hunt down our Republican whip, Tom DeLay. We were in session. The shooter was just down the stairs. During that rampage, the House adjourned for the end of the week. Like every week, just like last week, a bunch of us bounded down those steps, got in our cars, raced to the airport to get home to our districts. We had no clue what was going on down the hall in the Capitol. When I got to DCA, I was shocked to see how close the shooter got to, really, all of us, particularly if he had just stood at the bottom of the stairs and just sprayed us as we were coming down. We had no clue what was going on. We also had no information from our phones or from our beepers in terms of what was going on. Well, times have changed. We have that capability today. Every major law enforcement organization supports this bill. This helps an active shooter alert system so that potential victims can be alerted when there is an active shooter. I would just note in the last 2 hours, all of us here got four messages from the Capitol Police saying that there was a suspicious package outside of the Cannon House Office Building. Literally, Independence Avenue was shut down, closed to all traffic because of the alerts that we were able to get.…”