Political Quotes

“amidst the sometimes incendiary rhetoric surrounding the efforts to reduce gun violence, there are times when it is easy for people to overlook a basic fact: the victims of gun violence are real people; they are not statistics. They are not debating points. The grounds of our Nation's Capitol are filled with memorials to the dead. Our visitors and tourists here are visiting them as I speak, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean Memorial, soon we may have a memorial to the soldiers who died in World War II. Mr. Speaker, if we take all of those memorials to all the soldiers who have been killed since the Civil War, it would be fewer than the number of Americans who have been lost to gun violence in the last third of a century. It is not enough to simply have another memorial here in our Nation's Capitol; although, something the size of 16 Vietnam memorials would be impressive, because that is what it would take to list all of these victims. Last Sunday, in Portland, we had thousands of people standing and crowding into our little Pioneer Courthouse Square for our Mother's Day March against gun violence. They were standing on 70,000 bricks that had peoples' names inscribed who contributed to building that public square. It would take 10 acres of bricks with peoples' names to deal with the million victims.”