Political Quotes

“I cannot imagine how more tragic life could be than to be the parent of a child and be told that their father or mother is not going to ever see them again, that he or she was killed in Iraq. This is the month of military families where we recognize military families, and the best thing we could do is to say 2,100 children having been given that information is enough, but this is also the anniversary of the Columbine massacre. At the very time when we are offering our condolences for more than 30 people being slaughtered at Virginia Tech. While it is certainly appropriate to grieve with those parents who thought they were sending a child to a nurturing, secure learning environment, only to find that their child's life was cut off before they could realize their potential, it is even more appropriate that we act and respond to these tragedies, to try to prevent them, because we know unless we can reduce the proliferation of firearms in our society, that this will continue to happen time and time again. Our words of condolences after a tragedy will be hollow unless we can stand up before the fact to the gun lobby and to those who think that we can continue to offer grievances and not change the situation. Mr. Speaker, we need to renew the assault weapon ban. We need to end the gun show loophole. We need to restrict handgun purchase to no more than one per month. We need to stop these tragedies from recurring again and again and again.”