Political Quotes

“I will start today with some numbers. Unfortunately, some of these numbers are all too familiar to Americans concerned about the horror of gun violence. There are 3 numbers: 49, 280, and 99. Forty-nine, unfortunately, we know maybe more than the other two numbers. That is the number of people killed in Orlando just a couple of months ago in the worst act of gun violence we know of. So many Americans watched that horror and would have guessed that the Senate would have acted with a sense of purpose and urgency and even outrage to begin to take steps to reduce gun violence. Unfortunately, that didn't happen a couple of months ago. There were 49 killed in Orlando. We can recite the other communities in the country over the last not just number of years but even the last several years, and 49 is the Orlando number. I am not sure we hear enough about the other two numbers, which are the weekly death toll or the weekly toll of violence in cities and communities across the country. Two hundred and eighty is the number just in the last week who were shot across the country and 99 is the number killed. That is just 1 week. For purposes of my remarks, to set aside numbers for a moment and consider the human trauma, the human tragedy, the toll of that, it is almost incomprehensible, all of the families who have been destroyed by gun violence. For many of us, it is a news event that we watch on television and read about. We are horrified. We pray for the victims.…”