Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Connecticut who has taken the floor to take a stand for those who lost their lives in Orlando and so many other places. I know he has lived through that horror, representing folks in Connecticut, who went through the horror in 2012. I have a question about why we have to take action. I want to set forth a predicate first. The numbers here are just startling when you consider in the context of just the last couple of days--49 dead and so many others--so many others are grievously, and I hope not permanently, injured and all the devastation that means. Another number that we probably don't talk about enough and it is a much larger number. It is a number above 33,000--33,000 Americans lose their lives to gun violence every year. That is hard to comprehend. We have lost numbers like that in wars that go over multiple years. So 33,000 is the number. We have to ask ourselves why in the face of that whether it is Orlando or Newtown or Aurora or Tucson or go down the list of mass shootings. By the way, mass shootings were not a part of American life when I was growing up in 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This is a rather new phenomenon--a very recent vintage. But when a tragedy and a crime like this happens and the scale of it is so immense, we have to ask ourselves, is there something we can do? The answer by a lot of Democrats has been, yes, we can do a number of things.…”